After "The Invisible Man," filmmaker Leigh Whannell is back to tackle another Universal Monsters movie.
With The Invisible Man, filmmaker Leigh Whannell proved he could craft a sleek psychological horror movie that pays homage to the Universal Monsters while finding new ways for the brand to stay relevant. By comparison, Wolf Man is a massive disappointment; Whannell's latest doesn't know what it wants to say, suffers from uneven special effects, and the dialogue is subpar to the point that it's hard to believe the same creative mind helmed both projects.
Wolf Man revolves around a family of three: Blake (Christopher Abbott), his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their infant daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). When Blake's father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), is officially declared dead after having disappeared into the woods years before the movie's main events, Blake takes Charlotte and Ginger to his childhood home. In addition to packing Grady's stuff to empty the place, the trip is an opportunity for the family to spend quality time together, far away from the city's noise. As expected, things go south when they are attacked by a mysterious creature, with Blake contracting a disease that slowly transforms him into something inhuman.
Set in Oregon's wilderness, Wolf Man plays with the idea of isolation to amp up the tension and trap its characters inside a never-ending nightmare. The concept is solid, and Wolf Man should have been another hit for Whannell and Universal. Instead, this is a forgettable horror flick that fails to leave a mark in the werewolf subgenre.
The most frustrating aspect of Wolf Man is its inability to embrace the outstanding emotional hook it teases in the movie's first arc. In the opening scenes, we witness the warped childhood young Blake (Zac Chandler) had to endure. It would be easy to paint Blake's father as a villain, yet Wolf Man shows there is genuine love beneath his strict demeanor and acts of violence. Unsurprisingly, Blake grows up to be the opposite of his stern father, showering his daughter with love and affection.
That doesn't solve things. In doing what he believes is best for Ginger's safety and happiness, Blake risks scaring the girl, albeit in different ways than his own father had. That's the human core that should have centered Wolf Man. The movie gives audiences a peek at the impossible task of parenthood, showing how even the healthiest human relationships contain a fair dose of anger ready to burst into something monstrous. It wouldn't be much to compare the thematic ambitions of Wolf Man with those of classics like The Babadook and Under the Shadow. Unfortunately, the promise remains unfulfilled, as the film drags itself to the credits with a handful of half-baked scares while ignoring the human elements that make its first arc so enticing.
Adding a layer of disaster to the whole affair, the editing of Wolf Man raises questions about whether the version that ended up in theaters truly reflects Whannell's vision. For starters, there are weird time jumps between scenes -- in one particular instance, the sudden change in daylight is nothing short of baffling. Plus, the characters have reactions that contradict the main personality traits they defined just moments before, as if they underwent emotional developments that didn't get caught on camera. Finally, some expositional dialogue was shoved in the middle of the movie, seemingly because someone has decided audiences are too dumb for subtlety.
After the fluidity of The Invisible Man, the choppiness of Wolf Man is so appalling that it might be explained by studio interference. In Wolf Man, Whannell also shared script duties with Corbett Tuck, while the director was the sole writer of The Invisible Man. So, this could be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Whatever the causes, the result never gets better than an average B-movie, even though some genuinely good ideas were added to the mix.
To a certain extent, what Wolf Man does get right is body horror. Throughout one evening, Blake's lycanthropy progressively strips him of his humanity, pushing him away from his family. The camera shows the transformation in detail, with teeth falling and claws breaking Blake's flesh and ripping his nails, in a revolting spectacle that tries to showcase the brutality of the werewolf curse.
Parallel to the painful changes in his body, Blake must also come to terms with his warped senses. Whispers become too loud for him to bear, and his vision gradually gets adjusted to the night, to the point where even other people's eyes look like flashlights for him. Sadly, the visual effects accompanying Blake's change of perception look like cheap mobile app filters, more often than not diminishing the impact of the werewolf-vision scenes. Plus, as Wolf Man has a serious problem with uneven lighting, the shift is less impactful than it deserves to be.
One of the movie's most significant strokes of genius relates to its use of language. As Blake's transformation accelerates, he loses the ability to understand what Charlotte and Ginger say. To him, they are just speaking nonsense, while the humans hear Blake's words as undistinguishable grunts. The ability to speak is one of the main things separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, so it makes sense that the ability to convey meaning is impaired by lycanthropy. After all, the myth of the werewolf plays with our fears that a beast is hiding inside us, a creature of primal urges no longer contained by the façade of humanity.
Wolf Man's moments of brilliance are not enough to save the project, though, especially since the cast is mostly wasted. Abbott is the movie's highlight, delivering a layered version of a man struggling to accept his traumatic past and build a better future. However, once his transformation kicks off, he's relegated to the role of a predator, even when it doesn't make sense for him to embrace villainy.
As for Garner, she doesn't seem invested in the project, and is mostly just standing there and reading her lines out loud. To be fair, her character is written as such a one-dimensional drag that it's hard to blame her for not being committed to the part. The young Firth also needed better direction to shine, as her contributions are uneven, and her character is most used as a gimmick to justify many of Wolf Man's confrontations.
Worst of all, Wolf Man never gets particularly scary or thrilling. It's perfectly possible to make an excellent horror movie without worrying too much about subtext. Still, in this case, we get some tiresome horror tropes that include survivors making dumb decisions just for the sake of another set piece, while Whannell tries to hammer down a motif that never gets properly explored. Stuck in the middle, Wolf Man fails as a character study and engaging entertainment, adding another failure to Universal's long list of botched attempts to capitalize on its classic monsters.