The Cycle is a 2026 horror movie running on the Shudder channel, starring Deborah Ann Woll as a forensic scientist with an exceptional skill at deducing what happened to a dead body from a minimum of information. Jeffrey Donovan and Will Hochman play cops who ask for her help investigating a strange case: the body of a dead man was found near the bodies of two other people torn apart by some sort of animal, but all signs say that the man had been dead for much longer.
And get this twist: that man is her biological father, who left the family when she was four years old!
For a lot of the runtime of The Cycle, it plays like a modern police procedural, albeit more of a basic cable than Prestige TV production. Everything is polished and grim and atmospheric, and the performances are genuinely good, but it’s just a little bit off. For instance, every character has a Key Point Of Backstory That Defines Them, and they are all primed to deliver it in a monologue at the drop of a hat. The monologues are all well-performed, but they feel crammed into the wrong context.
I really wasn’t sure what to make of the movie for at least 45 minutes to an hour. I didn’t dislike it; I just felt that it was trying so hard to be a movie that it wasn’t. I wondered why it was taking them so long to get to the place where it was obviously going.
Once it gets there, though, it lets loose. It really transforms, one might say, into the movie it wanted to be all along. And it gets pretty bonkers, with some impressive visual effects that sure seem practical, even if they’re CG-assisted. I got the sense that this stuff was the reason the entire movie existed, and it had been building up the character-based drama not as padding, but an attempt to ground its B-movie soul in something more aspirational.
The other non-spoiler thing I can say is that I think Deborah Ann Woll is great. I always get the sense that she’s thrown herself completely into whatever she’s doing, and she’s going to sell it, dammit. She’s not shy about making it clear what she nerds out about, and what kind of projects she’s interested in, and no matter what it is, you never get the slightest hint of self-awareness or that she’s not invested. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the decision to have her character playing with a vintage GameBoy was her idea.
Even though it’s pretty clear where the movie is going pretty early on, they still treat it as if it were a spoiler, so everything after this point is a big spoiler warning.
So even after The Cycle goes nuts and embraces its identity as a monster movie, I still wasn’t quite sold. It still felt like it was trying to be two different kinds of movie, and that was a shame because it was so clearly better at being an over-the-top monster movie than a drama.
But then there’s a scene with the werewolf doing a retinal scan to get into the locked room where our heroes have hidden themselves. And as soon as the voice said, “Retinal scan confirmed,” that was when I fell in love with The Cycle. Well, that’s overstating it; it’s more that I fell in liked-a-lot-more-than-I-probably-should.
Because like I said, it’s not hard to tell that this is going to be a werewolf movie, and it becomes apparent pretty early on. But I was doing my best to be a good movie watcher and play along, acting like they were building up to a big reveal and ready to act surprised so that nobody’s feelings would get hurt. And when we see the transformation and the attacks, it’s a satisfying payoff even if you saw it coming.
But it wasn’t until the retinal scan that the movie was kind of giving me permission to treat it as the over-the-top horror movie it had wanted to be all along. It doesn’t go so far as to become a comedy, but it does break you out of the “are we supposed to take this seriously?” spell and let you retroactively think about exactly what the premise is.
What could possibly be worse than a werewolf? A zombie werewolf!!!
It is a bit too long, slow to get started and then stretching out the last act for longer than it deserves. This would be a lot more solid at 90 minutes long.
And while everything is clearly set up and knocked down like a Screenwriting 101 assignment — this watch will be important, this character is obviously about to die, etc — there’s one thread that seemed to be building up to something that never arrived. Early on, Woll’s character makes a point of how they can 3D print a skull from even the tiniest fragment of bone, and later she asks her friend to do some kind of “age enhancement” on the corpse she’d autopsied. They show the printers churning away a few times, and we get the barest glimpse of what it prints out, but we never see the end result, and it’s never mentioned again.
I was all ready to have the technician check the print bed and find a full-on werewolf head sitting there. And I was robbed of my chance to make fun of the movie for not having the technician just look at the 3D model, before going through the time-consuming process of printing it out. But instead: nothing!
Also: since the werewolf seems to affect electrical fields around it, I was hoping they were going to go for ghost zombie werewolf! And since it gives characters visions, I was hoping for psychic ghost zombie werewolf! But that was left implied. Maybe the filmmakers were just big fans of Malignant?
In any case, it doesn’t let loose quite as much as I might’ve hoped, but I did appreciate how far it did go. The coroner’s kill was appropriately gruesome (albeit predictable), and the werewolf did dutifully jump through a window at exactly the right moment while watching a creepy video tape. So points for that, even if it, disappointingly, didn’t go so far as having Woll turn around in the last shot and look at the camera with werewolf eyes, like the Thriller video.
You might see The Cycle as a movie that flirts with campy horror but never fully commits, but I prefer to think of it as a movie that says, “Yes, of course we all love campy horror, but you don’t need to be shameless about it.”
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