This gloomy-toned film takes its sweet time revealing its genre nature, emerging as a proper horror flick more than halfway in with a detailed transformation sequence. It’s the sort of showreel stuff that special effects technicians and aficionados revel in, although others might find the creature design a little plasticky, not unlike the things we see being 3D-printed elsewhere in the feature.

It’s a shame that the hardcore creature-feature stuff is a letdown because the drama leading up to it isn’t bad. We start with a forensic science expert called Meg (Deborah Ann Woll), a young woman whose shiny hair and perky professional attitude disguises a steely composure and strong stomach that’s not in the slightest bit discombobulated by all the rotting, decomposing flesh she deals with on the daily.

Meg is not in the least upset, or so it seems, when one of the bodies found at a murder site is revealed by DNA tests to be that of her own father, Peter (played in flashbacks by David Myers Gregory), who went missing when Meg was but a girl. Nor is she hesitant to pick up her scalpel and commence an autopsy on Dad’s corpse, finding strange anomalies on his anatomy, including evidence of gunshots and multiple ribs that broke and healed over the years. Father and son police officers Marks (Jeffrey Donovan) and Ian (Will Hochman) look on aghast but sort of impressed.

The mystery deepens further when the facility containing the bodies burns down. Meg and her cop colleagues start to uncover hitherto little known connections between Peter and the circumstances of his disappearance and a couple of locals. Meg even starts to suspect that her mother (Gretchen Corbett) hasn’t been telling her the whole truth about her dad’s doings before he went missing, and their mother and child co-dependent tendency to never speak of the missing starts to look like a rubbish way to deal with trauma. But all the sticky, intriguing psychological stuff gets backburnered when it’s time for the howling and hunting to start.