The newest from 2020’s Invisible Man director has flashes of brilliance, but often stretches beyond its reach thematically.
In 2020, the ongoing saga of Universal attempting to figure out how to leverage their “monster” brand seemed to have found an answer: Leigh Whannel. The Australian writer-director’s take of The Invisible Man showed a strong ability to modernize even the lesser loved corners of the horror icons, tapping into both fresh themes but also honoring the classical sense of dread and tension that felt like melding both iconic and modern sensibilities. It helped that between Invisible Man and his earlier Upgrade, Whannel was developing a promising track record for high-end entertainment on modest budgets.
So it seems like a no-brainer that Whannel take up the task of updating the other slightly dusty corner of the Universal canon: the Wolf Man. And unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, or even the Invisible Man, there is no literary template the movie is drafting off of (or in some cases, explicitly ignoring.) The origins of the franchise is the original 1941 classic, and other than the handful of sequels that followed, it has only technically been tackled again once: Joe Johnston’s moody but often dull 2010 remake.
All this to say, there is very little historical or pop cultural lore that Whannell is working against, giving him even more space to create something his own. Unfortunately, Whannell has set maybe unfairly high expectations for himself, as his end product in the new Wolf Man is heavy in atmosphere and some impressively nasty moments, but lacks the emotional or social depth of his other work. There are moments of the Wolf Man that are so masterfully crafted, one camera shift in particular, that you want it to be transcendent overall. But every time the film tries to transition out of dread and drift into a more personal narrative, it clangs against its own ambition. As a result, the end product is probably his slightest effort to date, but still filled with moments that stick to bones.
Discarding essentially all of the original film’s lore, the new Wolf Man centers on Blake (Christopher Abbott,) who grew up in a compound in the Oregon wilderness with his militia adjacent father. In the woods is a fabled wolf man, a lost hiker who succumbed to a disease that leads to a loss of human characters, who Blake’s father is obsessed with capturing. Once as a child (and in a killer opening sequence), Blake and his father had a very close encounter with the wolf man, which clearly left deep scars on Blake as he grew up.
After growing up, Blake moved away, married, and started a family: wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). But out of the blue, Blake is summoned back to the wilderness after the pronounced death of his father. As a bonding experience, Blake takes Charlotte and Ginger along with him. But soon things go off the rails when the family encounters the Wolf Man, who in an attack scratches Blake. This leads to him transforming, infected by the same disease, meaning the family is in danger both in and out of their secluded wilderness home.
There is an efficiency in how simple Whannel keeps the storytelling. There are long stretches, especially as Blake’s transformation begins, where the film remains dialogue-free. It instead leans on pure dread and tension, leaving the audience to witness Blake’s descent into becoming less and less human. This is when the film is humming, leaning into Whannell’s strengths for visual composition and scene structure. At one point the film visually transitions from Blake’s perspective to Charlotte’s, ceding the film to her, in a glorious triumph of almost entirely visual filmmaking.
And then the film tries to drudge up subtext, and the wheels fall off. Without getting into explicit spoiler territory, though the film itself telegraphs most of its next moves, the film attempts to dig into generational trauma and the means by which parents pass off their worst selves to their children. This a deep vein for horror to explore, as proven by it being a theme in seemingly every high-minded horror movie for nearly two decades now. The problem lies in Wolf Man fumbling the delivery. The acting itself mostly maintains the center, but it is working with a script that is heavy with thudding dialogue and the shallowest characterization. By splitting the difference of keeping itself satisfied to be a simple narrative but also wanting to gesture towards larger concepts it doesn’t seem equipped to grapple with. The end result frustrates, as it excels at one speed and falters at the other. And the clanging gears when it tries to shift can distract.
Abbott in particular is having a lot of fun with his transformation acting, physically embodying a man who is losing control of himself. He is buoyed by Garner doing good work as someone who finds themselves in an unimaginable scenario but having to maintain their composure for the sake of her family. You just wish these performances were in service of something more in tune with its strengths, rather than cramming two tones that can’t coexist. Perhaps doomed by his own past successes, Whannell has made a film that both highlights his strengths and his weaknesses, and here’s hoping he leans more fully in the former for future outings.
