So this is a movie based on a videogame of the same name that I’d never heard of. Apparently, it’s a VR-only game, which would explain why I’d never heard of it, while simultaneously making me more confused that it got licensed as a movie — I assumed it was a mobile F2P game that makes hundreds of billions of dollars, but no. Go figure.

Also apparently, the game is just… Werewolf? Like the hidden role social deduction thing? Which makes a lot of sense, because that is 85% what the movie was: Shit goes down, someone is murdered by what appears to be a werewolf, and now a bunch of suspicious humans/possible werewolves start throwing around accusations and killing each other in between bouts of the werewolf killing.

The genre execution of this is probably best described as being Clue/Knives Out-adjacent, where it’s a tense mystery-thriller that’s also a comedy, only with a side of horror. The problem for it is that when your comparisons are two super-excellent movies, you’re going to seem like a B-grade knockoff in comparison if you’re not also excellent, and Werewolves Within is not excellent.

And that’s not a huge knock; it’s perfectly fine, for the most part. The characters are memorable, there are some great lines. If you’re looking for a trifle that won’t make you feel bad about the two hours you spent on it, hey, here you are. But… it’s tonally incoherent. Lots of people get killed in various ways, and the movie sorta ping-pongs between “we should take this seriously and be upset at this murder and very nervous about what it means to the characters we like” and “lol that murder was kinda funny, right?” Comedy thriller is a hard tone to nail down because each half of it is trying to subvert the other half, and this movie doesn’t stick it. Additionally, the plots and machinations are about 30% too convoluted, and it’s not clear that it would actually all make sense if you sat down and thought about it in the absence of frenetic forward motion.

But so don’t do that. If you see this, know that you’re seeing a piece of fluff and lean into it. This is the kind of thing you go to see on a summer weekend when you want to go to a theatre but nothing compelling is playing, and hey, guess what we were doing.