WOLF MAN Review: Leigh Whannell's Backwoods Howler Doesn't Quite Hit The Mark

Leigh Whannell's modern take on the myth is interesting in places but misses a few things.

Editor, U.S. ; Dallas, Texas (@HatefulJosh)
WOLF MAN Review: Leigh Whannell's Backwoods Howler Doesn't Quite Hit The Mark

A man struggling in a strained marriage strikes out into the woods with his wife and daughter on a mission to reclaim a family farm and perhaps repair his relationship, but instead finds himself tangling with a vicious, primordial – but familiar – foe in Leigh Whannell’s update of the classic Universal horror, Wolf Man.

After his 2020 interpretation of Invisible Man managed to what 2017’s big-budget abomination The Mummy could not in reinvigorating the classic Universal monster movies, Leigh Whannell is back with Wolf Man. Transporting the action from Wales to the Pacific Northwest, Wolf Man borrows enough elements of the 1941 classic to keep it recognizable, but leans heavily on modern isolation trauma to keep things prescient.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) grew up with a survivalist father who ran a very tight ship. Having spent his youth with this domineering man hunting and foraging for food in a harsh wilderness that didn’t seem to want them to be there, Blake seemed determined to raise his own family as far from that life as possible. Now an adult, Blake has put down roots in urban San Francisco with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their precocious daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). However, when word comes that his long estranged and thought dead father has been legally declared deceased, he is forced to return to his childhood farm to claim his birthright, but he has no idea what he’s really set to inherit.

After being attacked by a mysterious creature in the woods, the family seeks shelter in Blake’s childhood home where they should be safe. However, danger soon finds them from within and without as the beast in the woods is now beating down their doors, while Blake becomes more and more ill by the minute, transforming slowly into something less than human, and more dangerous than any of them could’ve possibly imagined.

Whannell’s Wolf Man adaptation takes the same tactic as his Invisible Man film, bringing the story into the modern world by adapting to contemporary fears, however, in this case the film is less successful in translating those emotions into genuine pathos or scares.

The film’s opening is blissfully brief, quickly introducing the characters, giving us just enough background on Blake’s relationship with his father and the woods to help the audience understand who and what we are dealing with. However, the down side of that is that we are quickly sequestered with this family and there has not been sufficient time given to the audience to bond with these characters. All of the relationships are quick sketches, leaving the emotional bond between the viewer and the characters too loose to elicit genuine care.

Blake, the most fully fleshed out character in the film thanks to that solid backstory, is rather quickly rendered mute as the transformation from man to monster takes over, leaving us with a pair of characters in their own survival story with whom we’ve not spent a ton of time. It is a challenge to attach ourselves to this mother and daughter, one of whom has admitted to not being a very present parent, the other is clearly a Daddy’s girl. They are forced to quickly evolve into trusting each other through these external forces, and it never quite gelled for me that Charlotte is the ferocious mama bear she must become by the end of the film.

If the film weren’t so desperate to exude that deep pathos, it would be much easier to forgive some of the shortcomings in character development. However, when a film has this much on its mind, it just makes the disappointment all the more acute when it can’t quite stick the landing.

Whannell attempts to open several lines of genuinely interesting discussion through the opening act. The theme of generational trauma is introduced pretty early on, the paranoia and Covid-era isolation anxiety is expressed through the family's desperate desire to ward off this unwanted and potentially dangerous invader, Blake's interest in breaking the cycle of panic-parenting between himself and Ginger is a big idea that takes up a lot of space in the opening scenes. However, Wolf Man abandons all of these threads in favor of a relatively straightforward two-way home invasion thriller. The fact that it all culminates with what is perhaps the least surprising monster reveal of all time is just disappointment on top of disappointment.

For the gorehounds out there, there are several nasty sequences that may sate the blood thirst, but the fact that the film is set over the course of a single night in a dubiously powered forest cabin means that everything is very murky looking. When it comes to werewolf films, there is always the question of the transformation, perhaps thanks to the iconic work that Rick Baker did in An American Werewolf in London, the transformation sequence has become the default centerpiece for the cinema of lycanthropy. Whannell’s version uses a different tact, though, spreading the change over the course of the entire night, meaning that there isn’t a single sequence, which is definitely a strong choice to make, but it left me wanting.

Cinematographer Stefan Duscio’s camerawork is excellent, but the bleak lighting schemes – apart from a very interesting Wolf POV effect that I though was pretty cool – make it really tough to see what’s going on. Fans of Whannell’s Upgrade – of which there should be millions because that film is awesome – will be happy to see some of the signature camera movements used in that film adapted here to put the audience in the same unease as Blake while he is transitioning.

One thing is clear, Wolf Man is no Invisible Man, but it’s not entirely fair to judge one film’s success against another’s. There are scares here, there is dread, there is anxiety, there are moral grey areas to be explored, but it doesn’t come together in a satisfying way. For all of the film’s bombast and audiovisual pummeling – the sound design is excellent and definitely a reason to visit a theatre if you’re on the fence – the story left me largely unmoved. The Wolf Man is a character that is very malleable and adapts well to change, hell, change is his whole thing, but this version feels like a missed opportunity.

Wolf Man

Director(s)
  • Leigh Whannell
Writer(s)
  • Leigh Whannell
  • Corbett Tuck
Cast
  • Julia Garner
  • Christopher Abbott
  • Sam Jaeger
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Leigh WhannellCorbett TuckJulia GarnerChristopher AbbottSam JaegerHorror

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