Critic Reviews

Casting aside warnings and physical threats from the townspeople, this once-demure teen girl embraces her wild side with a gory, punk-rock abandon.

The gore is there, as are the transformation sequences, but they’re played in such a muted fashion that their more visceral pleasures are somewhat mitigated. But viewers who check their expectations will find a solid entry into the burgeoning feminist werewolf sub-genre that’s well worth a look.

When Animals Dream is a beguiling parable of cruelty and the resistance to it. Its special effects are pretty minimal, its scope is modest, and it is, in the end, more touching than terrifying, intent on jolting its audience not with dread but with compassion.

Though the careful mood is invariably dissipated when it comes time to kill, kill, kill, Arnby's ace in the hole remains Suhl, a young actress of Streep-ian intensity.

Stylish but slight, Arnby's debut feature ultimately sticks within werewolf movie conventions, adding little fresh to the form.

The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.

It’s a narrative vacuum big enough to make you mad at this melancholy werewolf drama for not being, at the very least, good.

An eerie, imported horror tale that’s rich with tone but otherwise lacking bite.

When Animals Dream lacks peasants bearing flaming torches to hunt down Frankenstein’s monster outside the terrorized village. But it also lacks the depth to avoid seeming just as corny, albeit in a dressed-up, self-consciously important way.

Avoiding the genre's typical werewolfism-as-puberty metaphors, director Jonas Alexander Arnby instead casts his material as a drawn-out character study — the problem being that his characters are all one-note dullards, which turns his slow, portent-heavy drama into a giant slog.