The Wolf Man has had a rather tumultuous trip to the silver screen now in its second contemporary theatrical incarnation. Originally planned to star Ryan Gosling, when this film was going to be directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine/The Place Beyond the Pines), due to the strikes, the pandemic and the success of The Invisible Man, the project defaulted to Leigh Whannell, who once again co-wrote the film with his wife Corbett Tuck. Given my love of the Saw and Insidious franchise, I will watch anything Whannell puts out there. But folks, including myself, have been sort of holding their breath about this project since the film had a pop-up presence at Halloween Horror Nights last year (which I attended), which was short-lived due to the fan reaction to the creature design on display.
The film itself attempts to look at generational trauma through the guise of a werewolf narrative, but it does so with the subtlety of a jackhammer. In the first act the film basically says the quiet part out loud when we first meet our protagonist and new star Christopher Abbott, who plays the sensitive, unemployed writer/stay at home super-dad Blake. He’s been drifting apart from his wife, so the pair do the worst possible thing you can do in a film in the horror genre – go to a remote cabin in the woods to hopefully regroup and rekindle their relationship. Now the film does subvert expectations by not even letting us have that scene where the family unpacks in the new place, sharing a moment of quiet affirmation before all hell breaks loose. But the family doesn’t even get to the cabin before they encounter the film’s titular wolf man, which here for all intents and purposes feels more like a wendigo or bigfoot and spend the rest of the film running for their lives.
While I did enjoy the more folk horror tone of the film, given the direction Whannell takes, it does so while really leaning more into the body horror. The grotesque transformation here is a slow and painful one that takes place during the duration of the film, pulling a page from Cronenberg’s The Fly. This would also explain the iteration of the creature from Halloween Horror Nights, but you really need the context, that it’s more of a work in progress than the final form. While I definitely bought the relationship of Christopher Abbott and his delightful spitfire of a daughter (Matilda Firth), it’s his wife Charlotte played by Julia Garner, who falls completely flat while channeling a distracting True Blue era Madonna – both look and acting-wise. She never quite gets the audience on board, before she is tasked with carrying the narrative to completion.
See, one really cool, albeit, really strange part of the film is when we periodically go to Blake’s wolf POV once he is bitten. We experience not only his heightened senses and Bluey-like color viewing schema during his transformation, but his loss of understanding of human language, making him an animal running on pure instinct. There’s also a few other weird K9 influenced scenes, like where he pees in the house and gnaws on his own limbs. It’s moments like these that only get stranger the more you dwell on them after the fact, and wonder why the film wastes time doing this, rather than giving more time to developing the characters. There’s also a final reveal in the film that’s about as revelatory as the Khan reveal from Star Trek into Darkness, the only way you won’t groan through this is if you’ve slept through the first act.
Wolf Man is yet another not so great take on the classic Universal Monster that will probably kill any chance we have of getting a sequel to The Invisible Man. Speaking of which, I stayed till the end of the credits because I was half expecting a post credit stinger where Elizabeth Moss pulls up at the end, to recruit Charlotte for a team of women whose exes had turned into monsters. But I think the problem here is this film forgets the humanity that made Invisible as great as it was, it wasn’t a monster film first and foremost, it was this exploration of paranoia and domestic violence and later turned into one of the best damn monster films ever. Here the film starts off with this take on generational trauma, that doesn’t quite develop before we’re forced to deal with the monster it birthed. I feel like more time with the characters and possibly a different approach by Garner could have salvaged this film, that just doesn’t develop anywhere near the emotional stakes of Whannell’s previuos effort. Instead you’ve got a gnarly somewhat forgettable wendigo movie, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t what I was hoping for.
