by Gene Michael Stover
created Sunday, 2026 September 27
updated Sunday, 2026 September 27
original at cybertiggyr.com/p7dhm.html
“Cry_Wolf” is a film released in 2005. It was directed by Jeff Wadlow. Wikipedia has a page about it: Cry_Wolf_(2005_film).
According to Wikipedia, it's considered a slasher film, a kind of horror, but I experience it more as a thriller. It's bloody for a thriller, but the focus is the intrigue & paranoia.
Some of the steps through the plot are only weakly connected, but the plot does still work. I mean that there are no “holes” that so many viewers love to hate.
Spoilers. I assume you've seen the movie. I write some interpretations that build on knowledge of the ending.
I've also watched some deleted scenes from the DVD.
From the scene where they play the game, maybe plus a few others, & also the deleted, lengthier version of the game (an extra on the DVD), it looks like Owen's superpower is the ability to seeing through people. He can spot their Tell, but it seems his ability isn't limited to that.
Dodger tells him that his weakness is being a good guy because it makes him predictable. (I think those are the terms she uses.) I think a better phrase is that his weakness is a damsel in distress. Saving Dodger in the swimming pool demonstrates that. His tale of taking the legal blame for a drug possession charge against a girl at his previous school also demonstrates it. I'm not sure it's a weakness, but the story wants us to notice it as surely as it wants us to notice that he can read people.
After the knife drops from Owen's backpack, he & Mister Walker have a verbal confrontation in private in the hall. Mister Walker says that Owen is likeable but not as smart as he thinks he is. Since this is not the first time I've seen the movie, I know that Mister Walker's statement is correct. It encapsulates one aspect of Owen. Maybe this is Owen's weakness, his real one.
Owen's ethics are maleable. I'm not sure that maleable is the best term. Maybe they are situational. He thinks he's a straight “good guy”, but he's not.
Dodger's superpower is manipulation. We & Owen realize this at the very end of the movie, but in retrospect, we see signs of it from the beginning, including how she “shepherds” the session of the game that we see, she comes up with the idea to create the rumor, and she very obviously leads & pauses Owen's romantic feelings for her.
Notice that manipulation overlaps with seeing through people. I don't know whether it's a true superset or simply a non-empty intersection, but the two are related.
At the end, we see that Dodger used Owen to kill Mister Walker. (Strictly speaking, we aren't sure of this as we saw no proof & she didn't admit it, but based on the implications & tone of the movie, it seems that the movie intends for us to make this conclusion.)
So Dodger was manipulating Owen. It was a battle between Owen's ability to see through people & Dodger's ability to manipulate. Owen's ability failed on Dodger until the very end, when her plan was complete.
Now we know why Dodger saw Owen's predictability as a weakness (which she exploited).
In the end, we see that the overarching scheme, Dodger's master plan, was that she talked the others into pranking Owen. They thought it was just pranks that ended up getting out of hand, killing Mister Walker, but Dodger actually expected it to get out of hand in exactly that way. Her alibi, if ever needed, was that it was just some pranks that got out of hand, & she feel sooooooo terrible about that.
After the knife falls from his backpack, Owen picks it up & holds it out in a way that, to me, sure looks threatening & exactly unlike the way you'd hold a knife if you wanted people to know you weren't intended to hurt anyone. Heck, you in that situation, you shouldn't pick up the knife at all. That was a pretty dumb, out-of-character act for Owen.
Towards the end, after a cop pulls a gun on Mercedes & Owen, Owen gets many (not all) of his “friends” together at night to explain to him & each other what happened. Some of the explanations are a little weak. (Let's call this the Group Confession Scene for brevity later.)
Mercedes dressed up as the killer to prove to Tom that a woman could be intimidating, too.
Tom's side of their dorm room was trashed, so Tom assumed Owen did it? (Why? Because he's the new guy? Because he has a British accent?)
When Owen sees Mister Walker's car, why does he head to that teacher's office? To save him? Get his help? Accuse him? He ends up shooting Mister Walker, but that doesn't seem to be his motivation for heading to his office.
At the very beginning of the movie, before we viewers know what's going on much less who anyone is, Dodger murders Becky. Owen isn't in the story yet, so Dodger couldn't have planned to use him to kill Mister Walker at that time. She must have developed her plan after meeting Owen the next day. So she cooked up her plan on the fly, in short order. That's a bit of a stretch, but since the movie is about exactly that, it's okay. Having seen that Owen could play the game & win on his first try, it seems he was exceptionally likely to suss out a plan that used him, so I'm not sure why she would select him as her tool. Maybe it was because he wasn't her friend.
Towards the end of the Group Confession Scene, Dodger claims that Owen is starting a new game, this is it. At that point, she's accusing her enemies, a tactic that Owen spotted the first time he played the game.
Some of the violence we see is shown in a high-contrast, over-exposed style. Those are imagined events. Some happen later, but the actual context is not the imagined context.
The school's gardener was Dodger's dad.
Q. Who was in the killer's costume when Mercedes was attacked? Answer: Graham
Q. Was Mister Walker in a sexual relationship with Becky Roberts? A. Probably, as suggested by the photos in Mister Walker's desk after he died.
It's hardly the greatest movie ever, but for me, it does a decent job of scratching the “conspiracy & paranoia on campus” itch. Other movies that scratch that itch include Disturbing Behavior (1998), The Curve (1998, a.k.a. Dead Man's Curve), Gossip (2000), The Skulls (2000), & The Skulls 2 (2002). Though it doesn't involve students or schools, Antitrust (2001) somehow manages to scratch the same itch.