Review: ‘Wolf Man’

Tame Werewolf Film Lacks Hair-Raising Frights

The Universal Monsters will never die. We know this to be true, because Universal has been making movies with Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon literally for over one hundred years, and they’ve endured some pretty bad sequels, remakes, reimaginings, and the like. Following the failed attempt to craft a monster cinematic universe, the studio went back to basics with Leigh Whannell’s hit The Invisible Man, which brought contemporary context to a familiar horror tale. And now Universal is hoping to strike gold again with Whannell, whose Wolf Man attempts much the same thing: strip out the mystical lore and offer a grounded, personal approach based on deep-rooted human frailty.

The result is…well, a mixed bag. Wolf Man could do with a few more silver bullets and hair-raising frights, but it does make for decently effective body horror that puts us literally into the mindset of an unchained lycan. Directed and co-written by Whannell with Corbett Tuck, the film stars Christopher Abbott as Blake, an overprotective house-husband keeping a watchful eye on his adventurous daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), who is a lot like how her old man used to be as a kid. See, Blake grew up in the forests of Oregon with his survivalist father, completely off the grid from society. During a hunting trip, Blake and his Dad encounter a mysterious creature that the elder had been tracking, barely averting disaster. Cut to 30 years later and Blake can be just as smothering as his father was. Meanwhile, Julia Garner plays Blake’s wife Charlotte, a writer whose focus on her career has left the family disconnected from one another.

When Blake receives a letter about the fate of his missing father, he brings the family to his childhood home in hopes of getting some quiet time away from the city. However, that creature still lurks in the woods and after it causes a near-fatal car wreck, it leaves an indelible mark on Blake that will have transformative repercussions.

Wolf Man mostly takes place within the cabin, as Charlotte and Ginger begin to realize that something’s wrong with Daddy. Whannell leans hard into the ticking clock aspect of Blake’s fate. Doom hangs over him as he starts to transform in small but grotesque steps: A bloody tooth pops out of his mouth, the wound on his arm begins to fester and rot away, his skin starts to boil. How long can Charlotte stay trapped in there with Blake loses control? It forces Charlotte to be the protective mother she’s been shying away from for too long, but she also wants to try and do something for Blake. His change is gradual, and she can still see the man he was which makes doing anything to harm him difficult. Worse, there’s still the problem of that other werewolf stalking them on the outside, making escape impossible.

The film begins to take the shape of a siege film, with the women trapped inside with a feral monster. While scares are pretty light, Whannell makes up for it by showing us how Blake sees the world as he’s transforming. It’s truly creepy to see Charlotte from his eyes; one moment looking and sounding normal, only for the light to take on a translucent effect, her voice begins to ripple like a stone tossed into a pond, her eyes shining like a diamond in the sky. In a really clever idea, Blake’s senses become so acute that a spider’s crawl sounds like booming thunder. It’s both beautiful and scary to be the wolf in those moments, as Blake succumbs to a body that is no longer is. He is both something more and something cursed. His ordeal resembles that of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly and it’s easy to see how Whannell was inspired by it.  I only wished Wolf Man had kept us there in Blake’s shoes for longer because the rest of the film lacks bite. There’s a good bit with Blake fearing that he’s become so worried for Ginger that he’ll “end up becoming the thing that scars them”, an idea that Whannell could’ve done a lot more with.

With tame action and undercooked tension, Wolf Man is both a bore and a drag. There’s simply not much story here, and it made me wish Whannell hadn’t removed so much of the lycan mythology because at least that would be something fun to indulge in. This is all pretty grim and tired, even with Abbott convincingly portraying Blake’s confusion and desperation, and Garner making a believable case as a fearsome mom you do not want to fuck with whether you’re a Universal Monster or not. There have been loads of werewolf movies, some great and some not-so-great. Wolf Man slots somewhere in the middle, ensuring the wolf will get another shot to howl at the full moon someday.

Universal Pictures opens Wolf Man in theaters on January 17th.