With 2020’s The Invisible Man and now Wolf Man, the lean-and-mean Blumhouse approach appears to be far more effective than the bloated, scrapped “Dark Universe” franchise to revive the classic Universal Monsters of yore. But while director and co-writer Leigh Whannell spins an effectively creepy lycanthropic yarn, this new film falls shy of its predecessor when it tries to find an emotional element to those things that go bump in the night.
The Invisible Man was both a tautly terrifying horror film as well as an effective metaphor about abusive relationships, and while Wolf Man sets the stage for a tale about generational trauma, family dysfunction, and breaking the cycle of abuse, it’s mainly a story about a mother and daughter facing off with deadly adversaries. That’s enough to make a movie go, but in this case, that conflict grows less interesting the longer it lasts.
In a flashback, we meet young Blake (Zac Chandler), who lives with his war-veteran father Grady (Sam Jaeger, The Handmaid’s Tale) in a remote, wooded area of Oregon. (Whannell’s regular cinematographer Stefan Duscio captures the forests and the mountains in a way that makes them both majestic and foreboding.) On a hunt, they encounter a fearsome beast, and Blake later overhears Grady on the CB radio saying that it was a lost hiker whom the local indigenous population now refer to as “the face of the wolf.”
Cut to 30 years later: Blake (Christopher Abbott) is now a writer living in San Francisco, raising daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) while wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) works a full-time newspaper job. Blake goes out of his way to be as kind and compassionate a dad as Grady was distant and demanding, but Charlotte has grown distant from both her husband and her daughter. When Grady is officially declared dead after having gone missing, Blake decides that a trip to Oregon is just what his family needs to rebuild their bonds.
Things don’t work out that way, of course; as the family arrives at Grady’s place, a figure in the road causes Blake to swerve off the road, and from that point on, the three of them are on the run from an entity none of them have been able to see clearly. And when that creature scratches Blake’s arm, he slowly begins to metamorphose into another potential threat for Charlotte and Ginger.
For much of its running time, Wolf Man effectively spins its plates as both a horror movie and a family drama. When Grady and young Blake first encounter the creature that lives in the woods, they get only fleeting glances; its presence is marked more by the film’s intricate sound design and by wisps of its visible breath in the cold air. Likewise, the rapport between Blake and Ginger — loving, but with a firm parental hand — gets established within just a few scenes in Whannell and Corbett Tuck’s screenplay.
And for those who come to a werewolf movie for the transformation scenes, the makeup and prosthetic team delivers; perhaps the only thing more difficult to portray than a rapid metamorphosis is a slow one, and Blake’s gradual transformation over the course of one terrifying night is fascinating to behold. (It also provides another opportunity for the sound designers to shine, as we experience how Blake sees and hears the world around him as he sinks deeper into his lupine state.)
With all the familial dynamics laid out, however, Whannell and Tuck wind up focusing on tension rather than on character, and that tension dissipates the further the film gets into Blake’s transformation and Charlotte and Ginger’s self-preservation. But even if it starts better than it ends, Wolf Man merits a look, not only for the craft on display but also for the powerful performances from Abbott and Garner, not to mention Jaeger and Firth in smaller roles. A cast this strong deserves a script with more to tear into.
Director: Leigh Whannell
Screenwriters: Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Sam Jaeger, Matilda Firth, Benedict Hardie, Ben Prendergast, Zac Chandler, Milo Cawthorne
Executive producers: Leigh Whannell, Beatriz Sequeira, Mel Turner
Producer: Jason Blum
Director of photography: Stefan Duscio
Production design: Ruby Mathers
Editing: Andy Canny
Music: Benjamin Wallfisch
Sound design: Chris Hiles, production sound mixer; P.K. Hooker, sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Universal, Blumhouse, Cloak & Co.
In English
103 minutes