What do you call the horror equivalent of a one-joke movie?
For now, let’s call it Wolf Man, the latest from writer/director Leigh Whannell, who has given us such choice genre works as Upgrade, Insidious: Chapter 3, and most impressively, 2020’s The Invisible Man, which asked the important question: What kind of person would invent a high-tech suit that made you invisible? Answer: the ultimate stalker.
Wolf Man attempts to look at the lupine mythology in a similar light by wondering what type of man would be most susceptible to transforming into a feral creature, with less satisfying results.
In the film, we find out that young Blake (Zac Chandler) lived in a remote home in rural Oregon with his father (Sam Jaeger, The Handmaid's Tale, Parenthood), a man’s man who taught his son to hunt at an early age and punished him when his sensitivity got in the way of him being all that he could be. While out hunting, the two are attacked by an unseen creature, and dad disappears and is presumed dead—an incident that understandably haunts Blake into adulthood (the older Blake is played by the great Christopher Abbott, It Comes at Night, Poor Things). He’s now married to the successful Charlotte (Julia Garner, Ozark, Inventing Anna), and the two live in San Francisco with their young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). There are hints that Blake has anger issues, but Wolf Man doesn’t seems bold enough to turn its werewolf storyline into a metaphor about male rage or Blake’s deep-seated resentment of his wife’s more powerful role in the dynamic of their marriage.
Instead, the movie simply transports the family’s story back to Blake’s family’s house in Oregon after his father is finally, legally declare dead, and re-introduces the unseen animal storyline. Instead of returning to the house in advance and preparing it for the rest of his family, the three simply show up in the middle of the night and immediately get attacked by presumably the same creature, with Blake being injured by it in the process. They eventually manage to make it to the house and barricade themselves inside, but the damage is already done, and Blake slowly becomes something increasingly canine. Credit to Whannell for his commitment to using pretty impressive practical makeup effect for this gradual emergence in a short span of time. There is no splashy, man-to-wolf transformation sequence like we’ve seen many times before; instead we get a gradual shift, beginning with a more aggressive personality and moving into much more physical alterations that Abbott fully embraces.
His version of a werewolf seems more able to control his impulse to flat out murder his family, and Abbott plays that conflict beautifully. The bigger problems are with Garner’s reaction to his changes—she seems concerned but not horrified or brokenhearted that her husband is being consumed by this literal rage monster. And not to pick on kids, but Firth gives one of the worst child performances I’ve seen in a while, which isn’t helped at all by her being given asinine lines like “I want daddy not to be sick,” and “Why is daddy sick?” Ginger is too old to be making comments like she hasn’t entered kindergarten yet. Also, there’s a reveal in Wolf Man that will take absolutely no one by surprise, and I was shocked when the film treated the moment like it was meant to be shocking (this is purely the fault of co-writers Whannell and Corbett Tuck, his real-life spouse).
The film is the latest Whannell has made with the Blumhouse production team, and because this pairing has resulted in works like Upgrade and The Invisible Man, I consider them worthy collaborators. It’s my understanding that Wolf Man was meant to be a substantially different movie, but that extensive reshoots changed the very core of the story, making it something more conventional and palatable to today’s audience. The more supernatural “curse” element of becoming a werewolf has been altered to it being more of a virus or disease, which is fine but less mythological and more medical, which is by nature sterile and not as creepy.
In fact, little about Wolf Man truly scared me, outside of its unnatural sound design surrounding the creature’s body changing. Blake does more defending of his family against the creature in the woods than he does threatening them, which is an interesting decision, but doesn’t really add much to the story. In the end, Wolf Man puts talented actors and filmmakers in a tale that doesn’t go anywhere, making it more of a disappointment than all-out terrible.
Wolf Man is now in theaters.
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