A father becomes a threat to his family when he is scratched by a wolf
and undergoes a physical transformation.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Leigh Whannell
Starring: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Ben Prendergast, Benedict Hardie
Following the failure of
The Mummy, Universal's attempt to revive their series of classic monsters as big
budget action movies, the studio decided to get back to horror basics and
hand the keys to Blumhouse for a series of more modestly budgeted monster
movies. First out of the gate was 2020's
The Invisible Man, which garnered positive reviews but whose theatrical run was cruelly cut
short by the onset of COVID. That movie's writer/director,
Leigh Whannell, has now been entrusted with updating Universal's
Wolf Man for a new audience.
Just as his take on The Invisible Man had nothing in common
with James Whale's 1933 original, Whannell's Wolf Man shares
little DNA with George Waggner's 1941 The Wolf Man, which Universal remade as recently as 2010. Instead, Whannell plucks from
various other sources: a bit of
Cujo, a bit of Razorback and a lot of the recent New Zealand
monster movie
The Tank, with which it shares its premise of a protagonist travelling to the
remote home they inherited from an estranged parent only to find a monster
roaming the grounds.
In a 1995-set prologue we see a father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), and his
young son Blake (Zac Chandler) come across something threateningly
inhuman while on a hunting trip. Just as Whannell's suspenseful opening
sequence was the highlight of The Invisible Man, this prologue mines tension from a fraught scenario in a way that's never
replicated for the remainder of the movie.
In the present we find a grownup Blake (Christopher Abbott), now a
struggling writer who stays at home to look after his young daughter Ginger
(Matilda Firth) while his journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) brings home the bacon. Blake has inherited his father's
over-protectiveness, losing his temper with Ginger when she disobeys his
command not to mess around on a New York street. This theme of inherited
toxic masculinity runs throughout the film and is handled in clunky fashion,
with the on-the-nose screenplay (co-written with Whannell's wife
Corbett Tuck) too often putting the subtext in the mouths of its
characters (the recent Kit Harington-headlined werewolf movie
The Beast Within
similarly failed with its portrayal of a deadbeat dad as wolfman).
The lupine thrills (I'm being kind, as there's nothing thrilling about this
mangy stinker) begin when Blake receives word that his long-missing father
has finally been declared dead and Blake has inherited the family home in
the woods of Oregon. While driving to the house with a reluctant Charlotte
and Ginger in tow, Blake skids off the road when a figure appears in his
headlights and ends up crashing his rented U-haul. As if that wasn't enough,
while trying to get out of the wreckage Blake is attacked by a clawed
creature, leaving a nasty scratch on his arm. Fleeing to his father's home,
Blake tries to protect his family from the creature, while slowly
transforming into a werewolf himself.
As with The Invisible Man, Wolf Man focusses more on the potential victim of its
titular terror than on the monster itself. Garner's Charlotte emerges as the
heroine as she tries to protect her daughter from her rapidly changing
hubby. The movie's second half owes a lot to Lewis Teague's film of Stephen
King's Cujo, with garner taking the role occupied by Dee Wallace in fending off a
snarling beast. Teague's film brilliantly used a rabid family pet as an
allegory for America's moral morass in the early Reagan era, but the subtext
remained just that, an extra layer for the audience to contemplate along
with the monster thrills. Today's crop of mainstream genre filmmakers seem
incapable of separating subtext from text, spelling out their intentions
through dialogue rather than getting their message across with their
visuals. At one point here Garner practically turns to the audience and
explains what Wolf Man is really about, but the toxic father
theme is so heavy-handed you'd have to be asleep not to have picked up on it
by that point.
Whannell seems more interested in what the characters in his film represent
as an idea than who they are as people. They exist only to get a fashionably
scornful message about masculinity across, and we never really get to know
them as individuals. As a result, it's difficult to care whether they
survive or not. By making Charlotte the protagonist in a lazy grab at
gaining some feminist good boy points, Whannell misses the point of the
werewolf movie, where the tragedy lies in the wolfman's own grappling with
his predicament. Abbott has the requisite sad eyes of previous werewolf
stars like Lon Chaney Jr and David Naughton, but Whannell reduces his
wolfman to a hairy threat to a poorly defined final girl. A very talented
actress, Garner can however come off as stiff in a bad role, and that's very
much the case here. Charlotte is such a one-dimensional character that
Garner is left with a permanent resting bitch face for the
entire movie.
For all its attempts to tackle heavy themes, Wolf Man is
ultimately just as silly as Joe Johnston's more faithful 2010 take. That
movie memorably featured an unintentionally hilarious wrestling match
between Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins in werewolf form. We get a
repeat of such antics here, and no amount of dim lighting can make it look
any less ridiculous.
Perhaps what's most disappointing about Wolf Man is the
absence of what is often the highlight of a werewolf movie - the
transformation scene. Adopting the joyless Christopher Nolan approach of
avoiding anything that might seem too fantastical for a cynical 21st century
audience, Whannell never has Abbott actually fully transform into a wolf.
Instead the actor spends most of the movie looking like a radiation victim,
or the neanderthal version of William Hurt in Altered States. If you're looking for a successful modern update of the werewolf movie,
I'd suggest checking out Larry Fessenden's excellent indie
Blackout. Unlike Whannell, Fessenden isn't afraid to give us a proper hairy-faced
wolfman.
Wolf Man is in UK/ROI cinemas from
January 17th.
