In what can only be described as an effort to win the Most Misnomered Title award, it is only in the last few scenes of Loups=Garous that we learn what the jumbled words in its title mean. Ditto the opening quote, which reveals to us the shocking fact that there used to be an animal called a wolf, setting up the gripping suspense of when said wolf will arrive on screen before promptly moving on to the real story: kids who can no longer socialize because of their mobile devices. Oh, and the blatant dystopia that keeps curfews on them and feeds everyone synthetic meats. The loups garous and wolf plotlines turn out to be irrelevant in their own movie, and in retaliation they derail the story, climax, and denouement and set up a group of girls singing idol songs as the credits roll.
How did a movie with so little substance end up taking on too many plotlines? Sure, there are a bunch of kids being murdered. Sure, this coincides with a group of teenage girls getting over the hump of social anxiety in a way that can only demand their involvement in the plot. But when those girls sing idol songs while hiding from GPS-enforced curfews? When the killer has been specifically targeting otakus who draw? When the members of the police force have layers of backstory so half-baked it becomes a blessing when they are left unresolved? The filmmakers didn’t fail to live up to high ambitions; they made a 20 minute movie and then threw darts at the police blotter to fill the rest of the time.
One of the girls is the best hacker in society, another is a Chinese martial artist. A third girl plays the androgynous straight man, cool and composed and quick to distance herself from mere humans. Of course our protagonist has no distinguishing features besides her innocence, “charm”, and overall lack of distinguishing features. No sooner had a character left the screen than their name left my mind; remembering their stereotype was more than effective. The only relevant one, as it turns out, is the third girl, who in a moment of unparalleled character development grows past her dislike of violence to brutally stab every relevant villain in the last few scenes to death before writing the whole thing off as an animalistic impulse. Thankfully there are no villains that are relevant before those scenes, so the only real casualty is any sense of fulfillment for our hundred wasted minutes of life.