This sequel picks up shortly after the first film ends. We meet Brigitte in a Despair Montage. You know the sort I mean -- clips of ostensibly mundane images edited together with some heavy music, to indicate a wretched emotional state. Brigitte is alone and clearly desperate. She looks and sounds like a junkie. Which she is -- though not for your standard drugs. After an incident which is probably not hallucinatory -- but which the film leaves deliberately ambiguous, since Brigitte has just o.d.'d -- Brigitte is consigned to a rehab clinic.<br /><br />Now, I don't know anything about the day-to-day realities of the Canadian public health system. But I seriously doubt that anything is as creepy and weird and unsettlingly earnest as this place. The halfway house director, Alice, is a very fine character. Played by Canadian actress Janet Kidder, Alice is surprisingly three-dimensional for her cardboard role. Kudos to Kidder. I mean, really. The Rehab Director Who Won't Believe You is kinda a feature of these sorts of films.<br /><br />All right, I'm going to digress.<br /><br />The most interesting thing about horror movies is the part which no-one thought about. In the creation of a horror film, the screenwriters and directors think about many things. Dialog. Cineamatography. Score. Special FX. MPAA ratings. Coolness. One of the least thought-about items in most cases is the backstory of the plot. Horror starts with a Bad Thing Happening. The audience is given a vague series of hand-waving gestures as to how the Bad Thing came to be, and that's it. It is the least important thing.<br /><br />Which makes it incredibly interesting to me. What happens, see, is that the writers reach for something easy for the audience. For example. In the 1960's everything was a result of leaked radiation. In the late 1970's and early 1980's everything was caused by premarital sex and psychological obsessions. In the 1930's everything was caused by travelling to foreign places and meeting weird people.<br /><br />The first causes of things in horror films are facile glosses of cultural fears. That's point one.<br /><br />The second things that interests me in horror films is who the real villain is. Not the monster, or the bad guy, or the alien who eats your face. Who is the one that does the human-scale evil that leads to the ultimate disaster. The real, understandable villain. In Nightmare on Elm Street the real villain was and is always the parents who murdered Fred Krueger and who subsequently refused to aid their children in any way with the consequences of their actions. In Psycho it's Norman's mother, who twisted him so awfully. In Scream 3 (and this is stretching the point a bit -- but only a bit) it's Hollywood, for how it eats its actors alive.<br /><br />The third thing that I love about horror films is the pretext for helplessness. The protagonists is always helpless for much of the film. Why? Is the villain all-powerful? Are they trapped in a spaceship? Does society refuse to believe them? Are massive corporations hiding the evidence? What strips the protagonists of their power? Or, did they have any power in the first place? (Which, box office dynamics aside, is one reason why horror films feature teens. They have agency and some power, but never, ever enough.) In terms of the things that interest me, Unleashed scores quite high. Birgitte is stripped of her power in two ways. First, she is degrading from within due to the disease. Second, her means of controlling herself is taken away by being locked in rehab. The real villain in the film I will NOT tell you. But. The entire message of the film is one of the nature of human response to internal evil.<br /><br />I'll say that again.<br /><br />Werewolf movies are always about how you choose to deal with your internal evil.<br /><br />Which leads me to the most interesting thing about horror movies, the thoughtless choice of first causes. Yes, yes, hot werewolf chicks are cool. We all know this. Whatever. I'm not talking about that. The first film was about what happens when the powerless get power. But the parallel message of GS was that power does not grant you license to do what you darn well please. GS:U continues that second theme.<br /><br />Brigitte simply refuses to give in to everything she wants, though she knows it's hopeless. Though she is attacked from inside her own self. Attacked by what she wants more than anything in the world. Her own desires are her enemy.<br /><br />So why make a movie with this theme? I think that once a theme is identified in a horror film, all one has to do to answer why is look around at the culture. I don't really know what Canadian anxieties are right now. So my guess is that this film is playing off of societal fears of Canada being infected by the cultural madness of the US, which fosters some of people's secret worst desires and makes them something to be proud of. Religious zealotry and intolerance, xenophobia, and warmongering disguised as patriotism are all things I think Canadians are culturally nervous about. As well as a fear/pride ambivalence -- they think they are strong enough to withstand our cultural imperialism, but are a little afraid that maybe, secretly, they'll like it and give in.<br /><br />Infected with a disease that forces you to revel in everything you hate in yourself. Sounds like a werewolf flick to me.