Even though I have some werewolves floating around this webisite, I've surprisingly seen very few werewolf movies or shows. There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think the simplest is that I tend to watch movies with other people and a lot of people I watch movies with aren't really into horror (This has lead to Wolfwalkers being the first 'official' werewolf movie I've seen. I do not consider this a bad thing, and personally prefer werewolves in a fantasy/secret history setting) I have, however, been slolwy figuring out what my taste is and I had a weekend to fill.
So I watched Viking Wolf.
Unfortunately, despite everything I've mentioned so far, Viking Wolf is still... OK at best. While it's not a Netflix Original, it does have a very similar vibe, which has been well explained in Damsel and The Netflix Curse (If you have 40 minutes) and I watched DAMSEL and I felt nothing (If you have 20 minutes). Roughly speaking, these movies are built to be a nothing burger in terms of controversy. They are built around being digestable, and are not nessisarilly intended to cary a message. For Viking Wolf, while we DO get bits and pieces of some story about Norway's relation to the outside world and we DO get a vauge idea that Thale has a strained relationship with her mother and step father, none of these peices are synthesized into a greater whole; I was first introduced to it through a youtube explained/summary and Viking Wolf is, if anything, very very sumerizable.
For example, when Liv and the police are hunting the original werewolf, they find a body that is identified as a 'asylum seeker.' Werewolves are referenced multiple times as roaming in from and around the other Skandinavian countries, and--as per the introduction--come from continental Europe. The Berg family is from Sweden (IIRC). But none of these facts ever reference each other... Which is probably for the best TBH. Similarly, Thale's relationships are kind of plopped down on the screen with little growth; Thale's relationship with her stepfather effectively boils down to two scenes where he 1) tries to be friendly towards her and not long after 2) tells Liv to give her space. Given that most of Thale's scenes are built around her interactions with other characters, this greatly leaves her to be a non-character... effectively a person who exists souly for the purpose of being turned into a monster.
I'm going to be careful saying this--because I am not a screenwriter and don't know the director's or writer's intentioins--but I do not think it would take that much effort to flesh out these points. It might not even add that much more run-time if scenes are carfully tweeked. For example, it would not take much to mix stepfather scene 1) with a later scene in which it's revealed that Thale's father is dead (or at least, very sick) This would free up the original scene for fleshing out either or both of these points further. While Thale's school scenes are in some ways more streamlined, I do feel like there could be a much stronger emphasis on the fact that she and Joanas saw somebody mutilated. (An expression of Thale's trama is, like many things, compressed to a single scene) Instead most of their co-scenes post attack feel like just a budding couple, which is especially odd since the girl who is attacked at the beginning seems to be Joana's og girlfriend and which Thale wishes to replace.
Of course, one explenation for the shallowness of Thale's plot line is that the actual main character is her mother, Live. Which brings us to...
Ulitmately, Viking Wolf is a werewolf movie that, as I have already stated, does not seem to seek a deep point or theme. In this regard, it's very effective at it's job. It pulls from a lot of various werewolf tropes and themes and mixes them in a way that feels very avoidant of hitting a coherent alagorical theme. However, it still needs to be horrifying somehow and as a result leans on the base horror of losing one's humanity. Very broadly, werewolf horror acheives this by either leaning on the fear of personhood being erased (A beast made out of a person) or the fear of beasthood giving a person an outlet for their repressed tendencies (A person who turns/turned into a beast) Like the rest of its themse and components, Viking Wolf feels like it slapped parts from both of these down... and it actually kind of works.