If there was reason to be cautiously optimistic about Universal’s remake of its horror franchise Wolf Man, it was the involvement of director Leigh Whannell. The Australian actor-turned-writer-director was responsible for 2020’s remake of The Invisible Man, which ditched the surgical wraps and fedora of the Claude Rains version for something more subversive that made the title character unknowable while also foregrounding his victims; capitalizing on our still present consternation over tech entrepreneurs with god-complexes as well as a post-#MeToo reckoning with sexual abusers and invasions of privacy. With Wolf Man, not only is Whannell attempting another stripped-down take on a famous Universal monster, but there’s even a symmetry to both films being released in the traditional dumping ground of winter (The Invisible Man was infamously one of the last films to get a wide release before theaters were shut down for the pandemic). Yet past performance has rarely been less indicative of future results than with Wolf Man, a creature-feature as chamber piece that leans into the complicated relationship between men and their fathers and the undesirable traits passed between generations. The film is consumed with what it means to inspire fear in your offspring despite all best efforts to the contrary, and becoming the very thing you strove to avoid. However, terror can only be taken as an I.O.U. for so long. Wolf Man is so theme-first and underwhelming in the particulars that it barely functions as either a drama or horror film. It’s so preoccupied with what it means to be perceived as a monster that it never quite gets around to being monstrous.
The film opens with a mid-’90s-set prologue in rural Oregon (with New Zealand standing in for the foreboding and remote location), where we see young Blake Lovell (Zac Chandler) living under the yoke of his ex-military father, Grady (Ben Prendergast). Grady is a survivalist-type who runs a tight ship — Blake habitually makes his bed with tight corners the instant he gets up — whose approach to parenting involves stern lessons over hunting trips that devolve into him screaming at his young son about how dangerous the world is. While on a trail, father and son encounter a biped of indeterminate species, only just avoiding a deadly confrontation, and it becomes clear Grady isn’t about to count his lucky blessings and leave well enough alone. Now 30 years later, adult Blake (Christopher Abbott) has moved away to the city where he’s a father to a precocious little girl, Ginger (Matilda Firth), and husband to Charlotte (Julia Garner, boasting a short Senator Clinton haircut, so we know instantly she takes her work too seriously). Blake is a stay-at-home dad who dotes on Ginger, even chastising himself for raising his voice when she won’t mind him. Both he and Charlotte are writers by profession; everything about them is coded as soft, touchy-feely, liberal types. When Blake receives word that Grady, who none-too-foreshadowingly disappeared into the woods years earlier, has officially been declared dead in absentia by the government, he treats it as an opportunity to save his marriage (a better film might invest in the idea that this is a relationship on the rocks or even worth saving rather than allowing a single, chilly exchange to serve as a signifier for the entire fraught dynamic). Faster than you can say, “The Shining,” Blake loads his wife and child into a moving vehicle and sets off for the isolation of his father’s farm in the hopes it will bring his family closer together.
It doesn’t take long for trouble to emerge, but, then, the bulk of the film takes place over a single evening, so there’s not much time to dawdle. Lost while navigating a lumbering moving truck through unlit, forest paths just outside his father’s farm, Blake swerves to avoid what looks like a man standing in the middle of the road, sending the vehicle careening down a steep ravine. Blake and his family escape the wreckage, but not before he receives a nasty cut on his arm from something that slashes through the window. Pursued by some sort of beast at their heels, Blake and his scared family make it to his dad’s abandoned farmhouse and fortify the doors. But the wound on Blake’s arm has already begun to fester and he’s starting to behave unlike himself. He’s sweaty and prone to anger; soon, pieces of him start falling out. No matter what he says and does to try to assuage his family, they are becoming increasingly alarmed by his deteriorating state. Eventually, he loses the ability to speak and starts gnawing at his injured arm. He is becoming less man and more something else, and it becomes an open question of whether Charlotte and Ginger are safer outside with the beast or inside with Blake.
There’s no great mystery where this all is heading (it’s in the title, after all), nor what (or whom) is the thing outside impeding the Lovells’ escape. Needless to say, the film repeatedly plays with the idea of Blake becoming his father, only underscored by the character wearing one of Grady’s old Marine Corps fatigues for the second half of the film. It’s something all parents are forced to confront in pledging to do things differently than how they were raised, only to belatedly realize there’s a certain inevitably to falling into the same patterns of behavior, often because you’re terrified of letting down the people who depend on you. It’s a resonant idea, but one the film is unable to sell. Part of that comes in the conception of Blake as a character and the way Abbott approaches the role. Blake spends much of the film on the verge of tears, with the character’s strenuous attempts to bond with Ginger and communicate openly with Charlotte never coming across like overcompensation. Every indication is that he’s just a sensitive person in touch with his feelings, and even as the character becomes aphasic and bestial in appearance, there’s something quite sad in Abbott’s eyes as he fights a losing battle against the humanity escaping his body. What’s absent, though, are any undercurrents of rage, either inherited or learned, laying dormant and waiting to explode under pressure. Abbott doesn’t appear to be keeping an inner beast at bay. Instead, his transformation is entirely external, treating his new condition as a literal communicable disease, so the entire thing fizzles as both metaphor and tragedy. Throughout the film, Blake robotically repeats “I love my little girl” to Ginger as though it were an addict’s affirmation and he’s desperately trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t quite believe. It’s not an uninteresting place to take the character, but like everything else in the screenplay (credited to Whannell and his wife, Corbett Tuck), there’s never a real sense of inner struggle. Rather, characters just speak in bromides because it’s the most expedient way to advance the story. Meanwhile, Garner, who won three Primetime Emmys as a live wire presence on Ozark, is slotted all too depressingly in the role of “concerned wife/mother,” spending almost the entire film looking on in a state of alarm or assuring her family that everything will be okay.
In its overall shape as well as its creature effects, the model here is less the Lon Cheney Jr. film from the ’40s — or Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning prosthetics in either An American Werewolf in London or 2010’s The Wolfman, for that matter — than David Cronenberg’s The Fly, with Blake’s transformation realized as a steady, irreversible trend of becoming increasingly deformed. As Blake becomes more lupine in nature, the film emphasizes the character’s heightened senses: a spider crawling on the wall echoes so loudly through the house it makes Blake nauseous, while his newly developed night vision renders the world as though it were a living black light poster. They’re cute digressions into subjectivity, but the film is on such an accelerated timetable that it barely has space to revisit them, let alone fully incorporate them into its set pieces. Instead, we get scenes of actors in furry makeup wrestling with one another against visually drab sets or smashing through car windows, sequences confirming that some tropes are so baked into a premise there may be no avoiding them (in truth, the most effective scare in the film involves little more than a racked focus and steam rising up from a place where we’re not expecting it). But what’s missing here is any sense of hubris or tragic flaw in the central character. Blake’s a nice enough guy who falls victim to events outside of his control, and that he inspires such fear in his loved ones is almost a sick joke at his expense rather than exploiting a foible he’s attempted to suppress. The film seems to be arguing that we’re doomed to follow in the footsteps of our parents, but Blake has, by all provided evidence, blazed a well-adjusted path on his own, and his “mistake” was ever returning to the site of his childhood trauma. Maybe the lesson, then, is you can never go home again. Does that also extend to returning to the well of remaking legacy IP? Asking for a friend.
DIRECTOR: Leigh Whannell; CAST: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Sam Jaeger, Matilda Firth; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: January 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
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