The Cycle
A forensic anthropologist who spends her days training students in the various ways death and decay of a body can inform how that person lived and died and her nights looking into cold cases, hoping to shed new light on unsolved mysteries, accustomed to maggots and autopsies Doctor Megan Garland has long since closed the door on the questions in her own life until she is visited at work by a police officer seeking help.
Investigating the strange brutal deaths of a woman and her young daughter up the coast in Lester Bay, apparently killed in their home by an animal but the bite marks yet to be identified, on the train tracks nearby the withered corpse of naked man was found, presumably dead for several weeks yet showing no signs of normal decomposition, with no identification but whose DNA led to Meg, the father who walked out three decades before after witnessing a horrific attack
Set in the misty Pacific northwest of Oregon, The Cycle presents a paradox which, despite her personal involvement, Meg (True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll) cannot walk away from, the body on the slab a stranger to her but showing old injuries which defy explanation, a healed gunshot wound and bones broken and knitted over and over, as if he had been tortured for all the years he was gone.
Her mother Joni (Gretchen Corbett) refusing to discuss her father, their lives started over completely after they were abandoned by oil rig worker Peter Stump (David Myers Gregory), the only lead is former church groundsman Lou Bishop (Carl W Crudup), the survivor of the 1991 attack, now living nearby if officer Marks (Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donovan) can track him down before the cycle repeats with another death.
Directed by The Head Hunter’s Jordan Downey from a script co-written with Kevin Stewart, The Cycle is part police procedural in the vein of Criminal Minds and Bones, part drama, as Meg’s nightmares revive old traumas and the case becomes personal, isolating emotion and focussing on the analytical, and all horror movie, recalling the misty forests and small towns of The X-Files as scientist and lawman gather fragments of shattered bone and torn body and assemble them into an incomplete whole, the answer in what is missing.
With Blue Bloods’ Will Hochman as officer Marks’ son Ian and Alien: Romulus’ Trevor Newlin performing the object of the hunt, alongside the smart script which twists familiar ideas into something horribly new and unstoppable, the fully practical effects are the icing on the bloody cake which, some minor missteps aside, is a compelling mystery from the opening scene which becomes a monstrous ride in dark forests and dungeons.
The Cycle will be streaming on Shudder from Friday 23rd October
