FIRST MOON: Lycanthropy Is An STD In This Aussie Werewolf Horror

First Moon is a religious chamber drama — a film that takes place in a single location — that also happens to be about werewolves. The film follows a waitress (Lauren Esposito) kidnapped by a religious order of suspicious and heavily armed priests who are trying to prevent the spread of lycanthropy, which they say spreads through passionate sexual intercourse. The crux of the mystery is whether or not the priests are telling the truth and whether our hero really has the werewolf disease. It’s a very strong premise for a story.

The lore of First Moon is far from the usual werewolf narrative, but then again, werewolf stories have been playing fast and loose with the mythology since Werewolf of London, in which a magical moon flower turns Henry Hull into a wolfman at night. For fans of low-budget genre filmmaking, there’s an interesting nugget of an idea in First Moon. It might not be a very compelling werewolf tale, and the end product is messy, dull, and cheap, but its script has many moreish themes about blind religious devotion, the cultlike nature of faith, and the lies we tell ourselves to sleep at night.

Bad Priests and a Werewolf Disease

What really helps to sell the mystery in First Moon are the two actors playing the interrogating priests, Julian Curtis and Shannon Ryan, who are phenomenal despite the poor material. Curtis brings sincerity and tortured resolve to his role, winning us over early and adding some wrinkles to what otherwise might feel like a pretty binary story. Ryan, on the other hand, isn’t burdened by the need to play an empathetic character, so her priest gets to play the delicious bad cop role, and Ryan elevates every scene she’s in with her ferocity and unpredictable mix of humor and intensity.

The script is unfortunately less enterprising than its best performers. While the scenes between the priests and the waitress simmer with religious fervor and moral complexity, our poorly defined main character has no dimension to her. The leader of the anti-werewolf zealots, played fairly by Soren Jensen, has even less. He’s a cartoon villain who feels totally out of place within the narrative.

The dialogue isn’t necessarily bad, but the pace and plotting feel circular. The waitress is woken up, interrogated by the priests, we see a flashback, the priests chat amongst themselves, and the waitress returns to her cell. Rinse and repeat. The mysterious nature of the werewolf disease and the priests’ arcane motivations mean that the audience is left in the dark about any grander design — we have no idea where the film is headed, which can be both a blessing and a curse. A tighter, more successful script might have adopted a more obvious structure — a full moon coming in three days, for example, anything to add some urgency to the proceedings.

The film has its surprises — the performances by Ryan and Curtis, for example, or a later kung-fu fight scene with some priests — but it mostly leans too heavily on an unambitious script with Esposito’s poor central performance, which cannot bear the weight of what the film is asking of it. The captive waitress should be terrified and desperate, but Esposito operates in a very low-key state of befuddlement for most of the film. She’s only ever at a 3, and the film needs her to be between 8 and 10 for most of the runtime. Not for nothing, but she’s not a very convincing screamer, either — horror film screaming is definitely an art form in and of itself, and in one scene here, Esposito goes for it and delivers full-throated screeches for about a full minute, but for some reason (maybe the sound recordist wasn’t prepared, or maybe the performance just wasn’t properly calibrated) it hurts the ears more than it curdles the blood.

This isn’t Esposito‘s fault! Imagine you’re writing a script and you call for the main character to basically be confused, scared shitless, and horribly tortured for 80 minutes straight with almost no breaks. Unless your director is willing to go to some really dark places to achieve that performance and that tonal consistency — see also: Possession or Violation — the script is asking way too much from the performer. This is why it’s important for screenwriters and directors to have acting experience. Never ask your actors to do something that an actor is extremely unlikely to pull off!

The Werewolf Doesn’t Look Like a Werewolf

The werewolf, when it does appear, is too little, too late. If you’ve seen the poster, you’ll know that the creature looks more vampiric than wolflike, with pale, hairless, rubbery skin; tall, pointed ears; a smooth, white head; a pointed, batlike nose; and sharp, bloody teeth. Don’t get me wrong, the creature design is interesting and fun — and takes more than a few notes from the design of the blind cave-dwellers in The Descent — but it’s not a werewolf by any stretch of the imagination. It also looks about four feet tall, which doesn’t help it feel intimidating.

While it’s a relief to see some kind of monster in this monster movie, the film also doesn’t really use the creature at all. It walks around for a bit and kills one or two people, and then the movie ends. It feels cheap, like the production could only afford the makeup designer and creature costume for one night, so it’s necessarily crammed into the final minutes of the film and never does anything more active than walking back and forth and swiping its talons.

Conclusion

This is the directorial debut feature of Peter McLeod — whose screenwriting credits include the films The Legend of the Five and The Red Shoes: Next Step (an original film, not a sequel to the Powell and Pressburger classic). Unfortunately, while there are a few good actors in the mix, First Moon on the whole is just boring. It’s not flashy or clever. I appreciate that McLeod filmed in what seems to be an actual warehouse, but the film feels as empty as the setting. Even in the worlds of first-time filmmakers, where critics tend to grade on a curve, and low-budget horror, where most critics also grade on a curve, First Moon just doesn’t have the sauce.

I admire the creativity of doing a single-location religious mystery-thriller about lycanthropy, but that’s also First Moon’s biggest weakness. The bones of the screenplay are decent, but the overall product is messy and plain, and the lead performance is labored and underwhelming — neither is as strong as they need to be in order to make this take on werewolf mythology work. It’s hard to tell what exactly went wrong here, but perhaps McLeod could have made a better film if he didn’t try so hard to make an unusual one.

First Moon is currently streaming on Hoopla and Fawesome and is available to rent online.