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.
