As a kid, I loved social deduction games like Mafia and Heads Up Seven Up. I think I learned pretty early in life that I not only liked being able to read people, but really thrived at it. To give you an idea, I played a Jackbox game with a group of friends who know each other more intimately than I know most of them, and I still ran away with the lead in a personality test minigame where we had to ascribe traits to players. I fucking thrive in an environment where I can examine someone, which would make a game like Werewolves Within a shoo-in for me. Thing is, I haven’t played it, but I have watched a great movie based on it.
Werewolves Within is kind of similar to Clue (one of the greatest films ever made) in that it gets at both the mysterious aspect of trying to solve a crime, and the fact that its premise is inherently baffling and should be made light of. Werewolves Within then lines up a murderers’ row of talent like Sam Richardson, Milana Vaintrub, Harvey Guillén, and even Broadway’s Cheyenne Jackson, and lets them loose in a Fargo-esque community being picked apart by, you guessed it, a werewolf. Adaptations of games often trip over themselves trying to make the connections to their original forms abundantly clear, but Werewolves Within (which may contain a number of references I just don’t get) feels like the most straight-laced one of them all, opting to instead heighten the premise of the game by making it a comedy as well as a murder mystery. The result is an objectively fun movie you can enjoy with or without the knowledge of it being an adaptation of a video game, which should really be the goal of most of these. — Moises Taveras
