THE STORY – A daughter unravels her father’s dark past after his body, missing for 36 years, is found at a horrific crime scene.
THE CAST – Deborah Ann Woll, Jeffrey Donovan, Gretchen Corbett, Phillip Andre Botello & Will Hochman
THE TEAM – Jordan Downey (Director/Writer) & Kevin Stewart (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 111 Minutes
Jordan Downey’s “The Cycle,” coming to Shudder, offers one of the stranger father-daughter dynamics put to film. A daughter who hasn’t seen her father since she was four is tasked with determining his cause of death when his corpse turns up at the scene of a brutal double murder. As a forensic anthropologist, Meg (Deborah Ann Woll) works with the dead for a living and now must untangle the mysteries of a man without being sure she wants the answers. This creates a macabre horror atmosphere born of family wreckage, beginning as a forensic procedural and ending as something like a classic creature feature. While the latter is weaker in execution than the investigative drama pieces, it’s still one of the year’s stronger genre releases, with Stephen King even saying to “put it on your calendar.”
The film opens with crime-scene photos of a skeleton, then flips through image after image while the credits roll, with the click of a camera on the soundtrack standing in for the past. A woman works through them late one night at a diner, and the owner doesn’t mind her staying after closing. Meg is helping a university with a cold case from its archives. She dictates into a tape recorder, trying to identify a young man from his bones. The diner owner spots the skeleton’s clothing as an early-70s service uniform, and she confirms: 1973. Then comes daylight and something worse: a home where the victims have been torn down to bone, and a young cop on a bed staring at a huge blood spatter. The tone is grim from the onset.
A month after the killings, Meg is at a body farm showing officers how decomposition looks at every stage so they can solve cases faster. She’s clearly the best in her field, has identified remains from fragments most wouldn’t recognize as bone, and approaches her job with enthusiasm. Her description – understanding someone’s life in reverse – becomes the film’s thesis.
The previous month’s case lands on her desk: a mother and her six-year-old daughter, torn apart, plus a third body that doesn’t belong. Its DNA comes back as Meg’s father’s. He left when she was four, took the life savings, and left her and her mother with nothing. She never knew if he was alive. Now he’s back as evidence. The cop who comes to her for help is Ian (Will Hochman), a young officer out of his depth who needs her expertise. She’d rather avoid the reunion but agrees; perhaps dissecting her father’s wounds will help her work through her own.
Woll is fantastic in the role. Meg could have been a standard brilliant-investigator type, but she’s quick, a little odd, and happy to spin out theories while Ian sits in awe. Her panic attack, as troubling images of her father flood back, is the best moment of the performance, capturing all the upset she has kept buried. Solving this case is profoundly personal.
The investigation moves to an overcast seaside town, a setting that, as “Widow’s Bay” recently showed, does much of the storytelling on its own. Meg’s examination of her father’s body raises stranger questions about how he ended up in a field near a murder scene, and the more she looks, the less adds up. Her findings clash with the original autopsy, and she pushes to be officially attached to the case.
“The Cycle” deserves praise for its script. Downey and co-writer Kevin Stewart have crafted characters that mostly defy stereotypes with real emotional depth. This shows best in scenes like the one where Ian describes the strained relationship between his father and grandfather and says some things get heavier the longer we carry them. The line fits Meg’s years of carrying her father’s absence, and Ian’s understanding of Meg keeps him from being a one-note young cop. In another scene, Meg’s mother (Gretchen Corbett) recalls the husband who disappeared, adding more depth to the story. Parallels, like Ian’s issues with his own father, Marks (Jeffrey Donovan), also a cop, are touched on without being fully explored. Through these conversations, Meg reveals observations about her fractured relationship with her father and her profession: she chases what’s lost on the wind by studying what decays right in front of her.
The case widens: the double murder and the dead father resemble other cases, all involving something that rips flesh apart. Another body turns up. The film handles this expansion well, never losing sight of its center: Meg’s father. When the links are revealed, they deepen the case in a shocking way.
Co-writer Kevin Stewart also shot the film, and the visuals do as much storytelling as the script. The cut from the diner at night to the daytime murder scene makes the house look darker than the diner, even though the sun is up. The investigation plays in cold blue-gray tones, with the camera spending real time on forensic work, recalling films like Fincher’s “Seven” and “Zodiac“. Lighting does much of the work creating the film’s atmosphere, and Nick Soole’s score stays moody throughout. The score and editing build a sustained sense of waiting for something bad to happen, while the sound design makes everything spooky even when horrors are unseen.
After a long stretch as a grounded investigative drama, it commits to being a creature feature, and the change can feel like a different movie has started. A classic Universal monster, ghouls-and-ghosts-type vibe is something you rarely see anymore, and it works, especially with its use of practical effects. But the action scenes slip. The camera gets too close and shaky to let you follow what’s happening, which is a shame given how controlled the rest of the film looks.
“The Cycle” is full of spook and intrigue. It ends with emotional closure for Meg, who faces down the monster she believed her father to be and learns how wrong she was about almost everything. Woll anchors it, the writing gives its supporting cast weight, and the practical creature work is something the genre could use more of. Stephen King was right…put it on your calendar!
