Blood and Chocolate

Directed by: Katja von Garnier

Premise: A female werewolf (Agnes Bruckner) is torn between her love for a man and her duties to her wolf pack.

What Works: Blood and Chocolate is a successful take on the werewolf film that features a fresh and artistic approach to its subject. Although the film repeats a lot of things that have been seen before in films like The Howling and Underworld, Blood and Chocolate does them very well, improving on them in many ways, and managing to inject a fresh style. The characterizations are fairly strong and the relationship between Vivian (Bruckner), a female werewolf, and Aiden (Hugh Dancy), an American artist traveling abroad, is convincing enough to sell the romance. Blood and Chocolate’s biggest asset is not in its story or in its innovations, but the style through which the story is told. The film is highly crafted and is gorgeous to look at. The cinematography of the wolves running through the woods has a great kinetic quality that matches the picture’s reverential regard for history and mythology. 

What Doesn’t: Blood and Chocolate repeats a lot of themes that have been done before in the werewolf subgenre. The Romeo and Juliet-style love affair, the infighting among the pack, and the mob-like structure of the werewolves has been seen before and the film does not do too much with these elements that is new although it does them well.

Bottom Line: Blood and Chocolate is one of the best werewolf films since An American Werewolf in London. Although it repeats themes and story elements seen in other pictures, it does the duty of this kind of genre piece, reinterpreting the old and presenting it as something new. In time the Blood and Chocolate may find itself aside of The Crow as a piece of modern Gothic cult cinema.