A Man on Her Back 

As a lifetime fan of the horror genre, there is nothing I hate more than when a horror movie treats its female characters as “scream queens" and victims of the creature or the serial killer lurking in the shadows, while the men do the heavy lifting. That’s why it’s so refreshing when a male director, in this case Jordan Downey, comes up with The Cycle, a movie that refuses to lean into the same old, same old monster-movie tropes, and he actually builds the entire premise around the intellect and the history of a capable, smart female protagonist.

Deborah Ann Woll plays Meg, a highly established forensic anthropologist who spends her days training FBI agents. Clinical, structured, and entirely in control, she allows herself to give in to her emotions only in private. However, when a newly discovered corpse lands on her table, it shatters her academic bubble: the body belongs to her father, who vanished 36 years ago. This shocking discovery pulls her out of her straightforward world and into a small-town nightmare, where a mother and daughter have just been brutally butchered by what the locals presume is a wild animal.