The Aesthetics of Stagnation: Ashley McKenzie's Werewolf and the Separated Society

Ashley McKenzie's bleak and beautiful film Werewolf (2016) would appear to tell a story about opioid addiction.The film's protagonists, Vanessa (Bhreagh MacNeil) and Blaise (Andrew Gillis), are both recovering addicts on a methadone treatment program, frequenting pharmacies for their medicine and conversing with government bureaucrats and clinic doctors about their progress and mental health. And yet McKenzie's feature debut avoids the tragic excess of conventional junkie movies. There are no thrilling scenes of the characters getting high, stealing, or performing sex work, as one might typically expect to find in a film about drug addiction. As McKenzie says in an interview, "I talked to different people in the methadone program, but I'm not trying to make some sort of exposé." In fact, Werewolf is hardly a story at all, at least not in the generic sense of a conventionally defined narrative arc. And while the departure from linear narrative has long been an avant-garde mainstay, the film's recursive structure and oblique close-ups suggest a suffocating constriction instead of some sense of freedom from the dictates of a commercial film industry that we might associate with earlier avant-garde cinema such as the French nouvelle vague. This is because Werewolf, as I hope to show, is first and foremost a cinematic meditation on precarity as a social experience of economic stagnation, one that attends to the gendered forms that precarity assumes in an era of deindustrialization.