Ashley McKenzie... she crafts a quietly devastating story of addiction, recovery, and relapse that portrays its subjects with both compassion and blunt honesty.

| Feb 11, 2021

Scene by scene, what McKenzie is after is capturing the process of a young woman walling herself off from sentimental appeal in order to save her own life, steeling herself for the long walk away from the wreck of her man.

| Mar 8, 2018

Her characters are a little too blank to sustain interest through an entire film, but this modest indie generates a haunting mood of 21st-century despair.

| Mar 2, 2018

The performers don't seem like they're acting at all, which contributes to the film's unsettling power.

| Feb 28, 2018

Werewolf unmistakably announces McKenzie as a potentially significant new voice, gifted enough to make well-trod ground seem newly landscaped.

| Original Score: B | Feb 28, 2018

Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie's use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.

| Feb 27, 2018

Working with the cinematographer Scott Moore, McKenzie frames her characters with a radical obliqueness, visually conveying their wounded tenderness and stifled fury and evoking mortal struggles with minuscule gestures.

| Feb 26, 2018

The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 25, 2018

The finely gradated interactions between the protagonists and different representatives of various institutional establishments place empathy and ambivalence side by side.

| Sep 28, 2017

In plumbing the pitch black, Werewolf offers the distinct hope of a brighter future - at least, a brighter future for Canadian cinema.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 2, 2017

McKenzie has effectively drawn us in, although lack of narrative makes the film frustratingly slow in spots.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 1, 2017

A stark, disquieting portrait of a pair of recovering drug addicts trying to scrape by in the suburban wilderness of Cape Breton Island.

| Feb 10, 2017

The familiarity and predictability of its scenario about co-dependency in the lower depths make the relatively short Canadian indie seem longer than it is.

| Sep 21, 2016