[Fantastic Fest 2020 Review] Teddy Flirts with the Werewolf Genre but Doesn't Commit

While a lot of terrible things have happened in 2020 and it will go down as a year that I think most of us collectively want to forget, one good thing seems to be emerging from the detritus of this hellish twelve months. Werewolves seem to be crawling out of the forests and into our cinematic hearts again. At Fantastic Fest alone, we’re getting three full-fledged werewolf movies in The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Bloodthirsty and the French coming-of-age horror film Teddy. 

Teddy begins with a cold open of an elderly woman sitting down for her evening meal as the power goes out. The camera, fixated inside her house, watches her leave the house to check on the generator and follows her unseen movements, until she passes by a window. Once the power’s back on, the camera focuses on the window, slowly panning inward until she screams and blood splats the window. It’s a nicely composed shot that captures the blood and the full moon framed in the corner. It’s probably the best shot of the film. 

From this dark opening, we’re whisked to a ceremony honoring the fallen men and women of World War II where we meet the titular Teddy (Anthony Bajon), who’s attending the ceremony because he believes one of the men being honored is his grandfather. When the mayor’s hunky and uniform-clad son Benjami (Guillaume Mattera) sings “La Marseillaise,” with lyrics like “Let an impure blood soak our fields,” Teddy laughs and is ultimately thrown out. So he drives over to have sex with his girlfriend Rebecca (Christine Gautier) and talk about their future. But “the future” isn’t something that someone like Teddy can reliably predict.

Teddy and Rebecca are the sort of opposites that attract in high school but don’t really have much of a chance out in the real world. While Rebecca is on the verge of graduation and has college to look forward to, Teddy dropped out of school in 6th grade and is now stuck working for a temp agency. Currently he works for Ghislaine’s Nimble Fingers where he gives massages and wax jobs to the local rich and entitled assholes, like Benjamin. Rebecca tells him, “it’s like you’re kinda stuck” while she is in a constant sense of change.

Except Teddy is changing...just not in ways he’d like. After an encounter with a wolf that leaves a chunk of its tooth in him, Teddy finds himself acting out in increasingly odd ways. Hair starts to grow in weird places, he finds himself transfixed by the half moon and he’s developed a hankering for meat. A visit to the hospital ends with a doctor explaining to him that he can expect hair in weird places because of puberty, I don’t think those weird places involve the tongue. And while I’ve heard of tweezing eyebrows, I don’t think you should be pulling a long strand of hair out of your eyeball. With the full moon lurking just around the corner, Teddy desperately searches for answers…

Written and directed by Ludovic Boukherma and Zoran Boukherma, Teddy flirts with some intriguing themes and wrinkles on the werewolf mythology but doesn’t completely commit. Puberty is such an easy companion to anything involving lycanthropy and shapeshifting, but Teddy isn’t completely interested in mining the dualism there, regardless of what his doctor says. Likewise, body horror pops up like an ingrown hair but the narrative never fully commits to the horror of it, outside of one or two cringe-worthy sequences. Along with the body horror, as the full moon approaches, Teddy becomes more sexually aggressive, turning the tables on his sexually-harassing boss Ghislaine (Noémie Lvovsky), for instance. But for a movie about a masseuse who spends a lot of his time rubbing down male clients, it feels very vanilla in its exploration of sexuality.

Hints of classism are introduced as Teddy tries to integrate his dropout status with Rebecca’s college-bound friends and the narrative works best when it’s exploring this topic. Teddy is orphaned and has been living in a foster home with a disabled woman and his one true friend Pépin (Ludovic Torrent), a person the town pretty much calls the village idiot. We learn from the cold open that Teddy’s town is a tourist attraction and there’s an obvious dichotomy between the rich citizens who benefit from the tourist dollars and Teddy’s sad predicament.

While he is dating Rebecca, it seems to be a relationship of convenience for the college-bound woman. One of the best scenes of the film has Teddy trying to make nice with Rebecca’s rich friends. He shows up to their graduation party with a box filled with booze but he is summarily ignored until its time to take a graduation photo and he’s given the camera. Instead of making an impression, he’s called “Teddy Trailer Trash” and gets into a brawl with Benjamin.

Unfortunately, like the body horror and exploration of sexuality, the classism is never fully explored outside of a couple nods to it. The biggest problem is that Teddy feels like a blank slate. The film angles the story as a Greek tragedy; there’s no chorus, but if you’ve seen any movie where the protagonist is a werewolf, you probably know the various ways it’s going to play out. Even though he’s well-acted by Anthony Bajon, who brings pathos to the otherwise boring protagonist, Teddy just isn’t an interesting character. The tragic events that play out don’t have the same emotional resonance that something like An American Werewolf in London or The Wolf Man—two obvious influences—evokes. 

It’s not a terrible movie by any means. The practical effects have a low budget feel to them but they’re sparingly applied to great effect and the few moments of body horror actually had me cringing in sympathy (we won’t talk about the brief, terrible moment of CGI…).

Teddy feels like it wants to say something, but it stumbles over its own framing. It keeps us at arm’s length and left me disappointed.