There's No Werewolves in Newark
2024 · 10m · USA
Directed by Fiona Kane
Tones: absurdist, humorous, melancholic
Bill quits being an EMT, loses his girlfriend the same day, and answers a Craigslist gig that turns out to be a recycling job under a deeply unstable employer. From there it becomes the kind of deadpan hangout movie where the plot is mostly mood.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Title promises werewolves, film delivers a Newark hangout. That's not a bug, that's a thesis statement. Deadpan disillusionment cinema is alive and well.
Selling a film on a cryptid title and then refusing to deliver the cryptid is the kind of bait-and-switch I respect — it implies Kane knows exactly what she's doing with genre expectations. A deadpan hangout mood is the actual offer.
The cryptid title bait-and-switch into a Craigslist-recycling-gig deadpan hangout is exactly the kind of structural prank that respects the audience — selling a mood instead of the title. Kane setting up Bill's EMT reveal as the real haunting is canny.