I watched The Cycle as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its east coast premiere on October 16, 2026.
Directed by Jordan Downey, and written by Downey and Kevin Stewart, The Cycle (2026) is a distinctive blend of forensic crime / police procedural and supernatural horror. (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, released in 2016 and directed by André Øvredal comes to mind as a similar kind of endeavor.) It’s filmed in Astoria, Oregon, and it has the grey landscapes, the rain and the mist, that evoke Nordic Noir, heightening its links to crime narrative.
The Cycle centers on Meg Garland (Deborah Ann Woll), a forensic anthropologist who studies bodies in all stages of decomposition: she listens to the dead, reconstructing their lives from their dead bodies. In a sense, The Cycle is all about understanding dead bodies, although, for Meg, while the bodies she studies may be dead, they are fully animate – teeming with life – in the way they speak to her.
Check out the trailer for The Cycle here:
The story begins when Meg is called in by local police who have found a dead body near a gruesome double murder that appears (according to the DNA analysis) to be her father, a man who vanished thirty-six years ago when she was only four-years-old. Despite her desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with her father, Meg is drawn in to the mystery of his reappearance. As she says, she would have had no trouble walking away from him if he showed up alive – but she can’t resist the lure of his dead body. His dead body draws her into his life, however – into the mystery of why he ran away from his wife and child in the first place (a mystery that isn’t definitively answered until the ending credits – so, make sure you stay for them!)
If the uncanny dead body of her father is at the center of this film, Meg and the people who join her to try to figure out the mystery – and then stop its onwards trajectory – are what stand in the foreground of The Cycle and compel the viewers’ attention. Meg’s friend and co-worker Fran (Dana Millican), the two police officers who work with Meg as things get stranger and stranger – Marks (Jeffrey Donovan) and his son Ian (Will Hochman) – as well as the local pathologist Ratterman (Jeb Berrier) are all well-drawn and relatable characters. They’re ordinary people, who live in an ordinary small town, who are suddenly forced to deal with something dangerously extraordinary.
You may wonder what the title – The Cycle – means. In part, it’s about breaking dysfunctional familial cycles, including Meg’s relationship to her father (despite her protestations that he doesn’t matter) and the relationships between Ian, his father, Marks, and Marks’ own estranged father. As all of these characters move toward answers about the violence erupting in their town, they move into territory that’s psychologically as well as literally damaging. The “cycle” also refers to the compulsive and reiterative patterns of serial killers. And it describes the creature at the heart of this film. It’s a resonant title, then, that aptly captures the many levels on which this film operates.
The grey and realistic landscape of The Cycle
If you know anything about the darker side of European history, the name of Meg’s father will give you a clue as to what this creature is (the trailer gives away his first name – Peter). I should add, though, that the creature is always also very human – one of the really good things about this film. It’s not surprising in the end that Downey grounds his film in history: The Cycle may feature a supernatural creature (and expert special effects), but at its heart, it’s a film rooted in realism – the realism of character, of science, and of place. I loved this film precisely because of the very ordinary canvas on which its creature moved. It’s rendered in a way that never quite gets detached from the grounding realistic world – and it always works within and gets its significance from that world.
The Cycle will be streaming on Shudder on October 23.
