Written and directed by Tj Marine
Starring Colleen Elizabeth Miller, Joe Bongiovanni, Sarah Serio, Vladimir Noel, Jacob Allen Weldy
1 hour 17 minutes
Unrated – violence and language
Available digitally April 20

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

My heart sank early on when I queued up At Night Comes Wolves. The stilted acting, the dead space in between moments of dialogue. Every moment feels like the actors just showed up that day. It’s a disjointed mess, hard to watch or understand. Thirty minutes of the 77-minute run time is reportedly footage from one of writer/director Tj Marine’s previous short films. Marine doesn’t bother trying to make a cohesive story of it, he just inserts title cards with inconsistent, cheap looking font to break up the segments. “Origin,” “The Past.” It feels like he had a deadline and scrambled this film together at the last minute. The title, like the story, also means nothing. I think we hear wolves at some point but they don’t play into the film, by way of metaphor or otherwise.

At Night Comes Wolves starts with the soft-spoken Leah (Gabi Alves) on the phone with her husband, Daniel (Jacob Allen Weldy, a dead ringer for SNL’s Beck Bennett), and they discuss his birthday celebration. He’s a jerk about it. When he comes home, Leah’s blond hair is now brown (and stays brown for the rest of the movie with no explanation), and she’s dressed as Wonder Woman and holding his birthday cake. They make out to the tune of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” which builds in anticipation of the off-screen sex we were expecting. It doesn’t match the rest of the film’s tone. Is it supposed to be funny? He tells Leah to “keep an open mind.” We see a figure enter the frame, briefly. What happened? Leah and Daniel fight after sex because Daniel immediately goes to watch porn. “You’d rather jerk off to a video then let your wife suck your c---?” Leah asks. That’s a sentence that someone wrote on paper and thought, “Yeah, that sounds good. I’m gonna go with that.”

After a series of weird, confusing scenes, Leah leaves Daniel and is picked up at a coffee shop by the overly friendly Mary May (Sarah Serio). Neither performer is convincing in this scene where Mary May is trying to convince Leah to join what is clearly a cult led by Davey (Vladimir Noel). I guess the cult has something to do misogyny and drinking some sort of special potions which are just water with blue food coloring in them. It’s vague and confusing. We see in another scene that Daniel is actually Walter, who is from a cult and was a cult leader (I guess?) In an awkwardly staged scene that for some reason takes place in a college classroom, we see that Walter/Daniel standing in front of a bulletin board with scribbles on paper. He tells a group of possible converts that these are “messages sent to me from another planet.” Some violence ensues and Davey and Mary May decide to take over and form their own cult.

My heart sank for two reasons. One, I knew this was going to be a difficult one to push through. And two, I know that putting a film together takes multiple efforts. People put other opportunities aside, sometimes even sleep, to make this happen. But it’s incohesive and messy. There’s a second set of characters going through a second story that has no tie or relevance to Leah’s story whatsoever (presumably this is the short film he borrowed clips from). In the end, it seemed like the best use of time was to add a zombie element, which is done well from a makeup perspective, but then the film abruptly ends. At Night Comes Wolves feels like a compilation of a series of scraps. The actors needed some more coaching so we can truly believe, for example, that Leah and Daniel are husband and wife, familiar with each other’s faces and mannerisms. Instead, they behave like strangers. Vladimir Noel as Davey is the most consistent of the actors, but it’s hard to focus on any one component of this film when as a whole it feels more like a rough draft than a finished product.