[Sundance 2021 Review] Eight For Silver is Almost a Great Werewolf Film

Like a waxing gibbous moon, Werewolf films seem to be slowly re-entering the public consciousness over the last year or so. From festival films like Teddy and Bloodthirsty to last year’s wide releases like The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Beast Within, the subgenre seems to finally be emerging after being dormant for a long time. I keep hoping that we’ll reach full moon potential and we’ll get a truly excellent werewolf film that history has shown we can have, but so far the results continue to be a mixed bag. I had hoped that Eight for Silver would be a breakout werewolf film. But while it’s better than any of the films listed above, wonky CGI, bland characters and a too-long runtime hold it back from achieving greatness. 

Eight for Silver begins during The Battle of Somme in 1916 and gives the feel an appropriately weighty and epic feel as trenches filled with gas-masked soldiers huddle while chlorine and phosgene gas attacks explode above them.  A wounded soldier named Edward Laurent (Alun Raglan) is brought into an infirmary and the camera captures all sorts of horrific imagery, such as amputated limbs casually tossed in waiting trash bins. Edward is dying and when the surgeon pulls out a bullet, he discovers there's’ a second older bullet lodged in his chest. 

A silver bullet. 

When his remains are given to his sister Charlotte (Annabel Mullion) and his adopted father, Charlotte is told she must become “the keeper of the silver.” And before we can figure out what all this means, we’re taken back 35 years to a country estate led by Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), his wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) and an obviously younger Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh). We quickly discover that the expansive land owned by Seamus and a bunch of other, old white men is being challenged by an incoming migratory group of Romanis. Their claim to the land is valid, stretching back 80s years before but Seamus and co look down on them with disrespect and the pejorative word “gypsies” is thrown around a lot. 

To solve their land issues, Seamus and his council of white men hire mercenaries to descend on the Romani camp and slaughter them. Writer/Director Sean Ellis stages this massacre with detached casualness, framing the entire camp in one static shot as the mercenaries light their tents on fire and shoot, stab and run down the entire camp. It’s a stunningly realized sequence, filmed in a single take that cements that our “heroes” of the story are actually the worst. The viciousness continues as they cruelly string a man to a cross, lop off his limbs and stuff the gaping holes with straw before hoisting him up as a scarecrow. And below his body, an old Romani woman is buried alive, grasping onto a set of silver-fanged wolf dentures as the dirt covers her face.

It’s bleak.

This sense of melancholic bleakness continues through the entirety of the 113 minute runtime, as Ellis slowly unspools the mystery and the horror of the situation. Thematically, Eight for Silver relies on the traditional moral of “The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” Soon, the town’s children all start having recurring nightmares (cue copious dream-related jump scares) about a scarecrow and a set of silver teeth. Curiosity leads the kids to the teeth, leaving Edward with a vicious bite. That night, while Edward is feverishly moaning in bed, Charlotte discovers root-like tendrils coming out of his body and then Edward mysteriously disappears. Seamus leads a search party and John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a traveling pathologist from the infamous town of Gévaudan, shows up searching for the roving band of Romanis. Before you know it, the bodies start gruesomely piling up and McBride must uncover the truth of the curse afflicting the town before there’s no one left alive to save.

Eight for Silver is a gorgeously filmed werewolf film that shows reverence for the cinematic werewolf stories of the Hammer era and, of course, the Universal classics. The haunting manor stands dark and craggy against the dark, foggy forests and in an early sequence where Seamus leads a search party for his son, the forests exude a classically gothic mood; their torches fighting back the encroaching fog among the knotty trees. Elegant and dread-inducing, the entire film is stunningly realized with Ellis slowly unfurling its mysteries. Emphasis on slowly because Eight for Silver is methodically paced and those who are not invested in the mystery will find the first hour plodding. 

The double edged sword of crafting a werewolf story is that the viewer knows the culprit is a werewolf and so we spend most of the runtime waiting for the characters to catch up. Personally, I enjoyed the cautious way Ellis feeds us the story and his interpretation of the werewolf legend (mixed with the addition of the more science-minded pathologist) kept me intrigued the entire way through. This version of the werewolf is different and gnarly, evidenced in one particular sequence that had me gasping at the The Thing-level body horror on display. 

Unfortunately, this scene aside, the CGI fails the monsters, who look too bright and detached from the darkly lit aesthetics of the film. Even still, these computer created monsters had more personality than the bland characters on display. The cast is stacked with fantastic character actors like Kelly Reilly who gave a wonderful performance in Eli and the always reliable Alistair Petrie. Unfortunately, their talents are wasted on characters who don’t really have much...er, character. 

For the majority of the film, Eight for Silver maintains a slow-build burn that’s just constantly churning under the surface. Eventually, the characters realize what they’re up against and the sequence mentioned above shows just how horrific their threat is. And it’s here that the film takes a stumble. The constantly escalating tension almost reaches a boiling point but it never quite explodes when it should. The last half of the film keeps that simmering tension throughout and some of the final set pieces set at the manor were begging for the narrative to really pop off. Unfortunately, it never quite reaches the unrelenting tension of the first half of the film and while I don’t normally pine for what could have been in a film, Eight for Silver almost married a perfect tone of prestige horror with popcorn entertainment. 

Still, it’s a good film on the cusp of greatness and easily the best of the werewolf films released in the last year or coming down the pike from festival runs.