Bookstore, Backwater, and Bad Life Choices
There are a lot of ways to get bitten by life: bad jobs, bad relationships, bad loans. I Am Lisa adds “bad small-town law enforcement feeding you to wolves” to that list. Patrick Rea’s 2020 horror revenge flick is a scrappy, blood-smeared gem—a low-budget, character-driven werewolf story that decides, quite sensibly, that if the system won’t protect you, you might as well grow claws. It’s part creature feature, part rape-revenge story, and part “burn-it-all-down” fantasy for anyone who’s ever been dismissed by smug local authorities who treat the law like a family discount code.
Lisa Leroux: Shy Book Nerd, Reluctant Apex Predator
Lisa Leroux (Kristen Vaganos) is the kind of protagonist horror doesn’t usually reward. She’s quiet, thoughtful, runs a bookstore that would barely survive in a good town, and clearly just wants to be left alone with her paperbacks and mild depression. Instead, she gets Jess—the local drug dealer, resident mean girl, and poster child for why some people should never be allowed to reproduce, let alone run a criminal sideline.
The early scenes establish Lisa’s vulnerability with painful effectiveness. This isn’t a “final girl in training” so much as a woman who got handed the wrong life. Vaganos plays her with a shy, inward energy that makes what happens to her hurt more than your average slasher setup. She doesn’t feel like a horror archetype; she feels like the person shelving books at that store you always mean to support and never do.
The Police Department from Absolute Hell
Lisa does what victims are told to do: she reports the assault. Unfortunately, she lives in the kind of small town where corruption isn’t a bug, it’s the entire operating system. Sheriff Deb (Manon Halliburton) is Jess’s mom, Deputy Nick is Deb’s brother, and together they run the department like a family-owned dictatorship with side benefits.
Their response to Lisa isn’t just dismissive—it’s aggressively cruel. The message is brutally clear: your pain is inconvenient, your attacker is “one of us,” and the law is a weapon, not a shield. Then Deb goes one step further into cartoon supervillain territory: she arranges to have Lisa beaten, dragged into the woods, and left out as wolf chow. This is the part of the movie where any faith in “working within the system” is stomped to death behind the station.
The dark humor here is bitter but sharp: if you’ve ever muttered that cops treat victims like disposable problems, I Am Lisa looks you dead in the eye and says, “Oh, you have no idea.”
Wolf Bites and Second Chances
Of course, Lisa does not die. That would be a very short movie and a very long content warning. Instead, the wolves maul her but don’t finish the job, and those bite marks come with a very familiar curse: she starts to change.
Rea and writer Eric Winkler don’t reinvent werewolf mythology so much as quietly retrofit it. The transformation here isn’t just about body horror—it’s about power. Lisa’s healing speeds up, her senses sharpen, and that meek bookstore energy is replaced by something leaner, hungrier, and a lot less interested in taking anyone’s crap.
The film wisely uses Sam (Jennifer Seward), Lisa’s friend, as both emotional anchor and horrified witness. Sam’s reaction—somewhere between “I love you” and “please don’t eat me”—keeps the story grounded. We’re not watching a monster arrive so much as a woman finally getting the ability to push back in a world that only understands violence.
Sheriff Deb: Villainy with Extra Viciousness
If Lisa is the wounded heart of the movie, Sheriff Deb is its blackened spleen. Halliburton plays her with a venomous, almost gleeful malice; she’s not conflicted, she’s not tortured, she’s just rotten. The script gives her a history of dealing with werewolves—she’s done this before to Lisa’s cousin Gretchen, who survived long enough to turn and then had to be hunted down. That little plot detail does two things:
-
It turns Deb from “corrupt sheriff” into “serial monster-maker with a badge.”
-
It makes you actively root for her to face something she can’t control, bribe, or shoot.
There’s a grim, satisfying poetry in the fact that Deb understands werewolves better than anyone in town and still doesn’t recognize she’s the one breeding them.
Revenge, But Make It Lycanthropic
Once Lisa’s transformation really kicks in, the movie settles into its revenge structure. The targets are exactly who you’d expect: Millie, Dana, Jess, Nick—anyone who helped brutalize her or threaten Sam, and anyone who thought her bookstore and body were fair game.
What works well is that the film doesn’t turn this into a slick, superhero-style power fantasy. Lisa’s kills are messy, emotional, and tinged with that unsettling realization that the line between justice and savagery is getting blurry. She’s not suddenly quipping while ripping throats; she’s working through trauma with claws and teeth because the court system was too busy playing favorites.
Still, there’s dark, primal satisfaction watching the town’s worst people discover that their favorite victim now has night vision and a bite radius. If “support local businesses” ever needed a horror mascot, I’d nominate werewolf Lisa tearing into the people who trashed her shop.
Small-Town Gothic on a Budget
Visually, I Am Lisa is clearly working with limited resources, but it uses them smartly. The town feels believably small and suffocating: a few key locations—a bookstore, a station, a house, the woods—reused in ways that make the story feel contained, like the whole place is a trap no one ever really escapes.
The werewolf effects lean more on suggestion than elaborate transformation sequences. You get glimpses: eyes, teeth, wounds, shadows. It’s less An American Werewolf in London’s showstopper metamorphosis and more “you do not want to see what she looks like under this lighting.” Some viewers might want more full-on monster shots, but the restraint helps the revenge angle: this is still Lisa, not a completely separate beast. Her humanity is dented, not erased.
Performances That Sell the Bite
Kristen Vaganos carries the film with a performance that grows sharper as Lisa does. Early on, she’s all hunched shoulders and quiet defeat; later, there’s a feral calm behind her eyes, the kind of stillness that says, “I’ve already decided what happens to you.” She never stops being sympathetic, even when the bodies start piling up, which is a neat trick in a story where the moral high ground is somewhere under six feet of dirt.
Manon Halliburton seems to relish every venomous line as Deb. She’s the kind of antagonist you don’t secretly like—you just desperately want to see destroyed. Carmen Anello’s Jess is pure, concentrated mean-girl malice, the kind of person who’d key your car and then post about “haters” online. The supporting cast—Nick, Dana, Millie, Sam—rounds out the picture of a town where cruelty has become habit.
Rage, Catharsis, and the Call of the Wild
At its core, I Am Lisa is a revenge movie wearing a werewolf mask, and that’s not a complaint. The horror comes as much from human behavior as from the supernatural. The cops are worse than the creatures, the bullies are more terrifying than the fangs, and the system is far more monstrous than the wolves circling in the trees.
That’s what gives the final act its punch. When Deb ends up in the same woods where she left Lisa and Gretchen to die, the justice isn’t subtle, but subtlety was never going to cut it here. Lisa walking away while the wolves close in on Deb feels less like a monster’s victory and more like the universe grudgingly correcting a long-overdue error.
Final Howl
I Am Lisa isn’t perfect—it’s rough around the edges, some scenes feel a bit on-the-nose, and the budget occasionally shows—but it’s got something a lot of slicker horror films lack: anger, heart, and a clear sense of what it wants to say. It takes the familiar werewolf myth and grafts it onto a story about abuse of power, institutional corruption, and what happens when the people you’re supposed to trust decide you’re disposable.
It’s a solid, grisly little horror revenge tale with a beating feminist heart and a pair of very sharp teeth. And if you’ve ever been talked over, disbelieved, or dismissed by someone who thought their last name mattered more than your safety, watching Lisa grow into something that can’t be ignored feels just a little bit like healing—messy, bloody healing, sure, but healing all the same.
