Wolf Man
I am a fan of writer/director Leigh Whannell. It gets somewhat lost now under the weight of the attenuated franchise, but Whannell’s first feature (he co-wrote and co-starred), Saw, was a brutally clever low-budget surprise hit that announced new talents had arrived on the genre film scene. 2010’s Insidious breathed fresh life into the supernatural thriller, and the underrated Upgrade (which he also directed) demonstrated that Whannell could work effectively in the sci-fi and action genres as well. The superb The Invisible Man was both a critical and commercial success, a reinvention of the classic H. G. Wells story that worked on every level. So it’s without pleasure that I report Whannell’s latest movie, Wolf Man, is a well-intended but lackluster misfire.
In 1995 Oregon, young Blake goes on a hunting trip in the woods with his father, Grady. Grady is somewhat severe in his frustrations with Blake, but he attributes this to trying to prepare him for the dangers of the world. While on the trip, the father and son end up hiding in an elevated hunting blind to avoid a monstrous humanoid until Grady shoots at it and drives it away. Thirty years pass.
Blake (Christopher Abbott) now lives in San Francisco with his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and his daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). He’s in between writing jobs and is being a house dad for Ginger while Charlotte works full-time. He’s not comfortable with the situation, but he tries to restrain his temper, not wanting to be the kind of dad Grady was. One day he receives a death certificate concerning his estranged father, so Blake convinces Charlotte to take some time off work to help him deal with settling his father’s property assets in Oregon.
They get lost in the woods while driving, trying to find Grady’s house, and have an accident after a humanoid creature causes them to swerve and veer off the road. The creature scratches Blake before it runs off to claim an easier victim. Blake gets his family into Grady’s old house, barricading the door behind them. As the evening progresses, Blake’s wound is clearly infected, and he gradually begins to change, becoming less human. At first trying to protect his family from the outside threat, eventually Charlotte must protect herself and Ginger from the thing he is becoming.
Abbott, an actor whose work I’ve enjoyed in films such as Possessor and Sanctuary, does what he can here, but the leaden quality of the writing and the underwhelming creature conception prevents him from displaying the full range of his talents. Garner, unfortunately, has it even worse with an underwritten character that seems more like a supporting role until the final third of the film, in which she’s given standard horror movie heroine things to do. In other words, the filmmakers took the actress who played Ruth in Ozark, one of the most feisty and kickass characters in recent television history, and made her blandly unmemorable. Firth fares the best, playing a daughter who loves her dad even when he has taken up residence in the realm of the very unwell.
There are a couple of effective sequences in the movie. The opening scene builds a nice amount of tension, as the creature tries to get into the hunting blind. The POV shifts from human to werewolf perception are artfully done, especially during a scene in which Charlotte perceives nothing but darkness in the house while werewolf Blake stands a few feet away, able to clearly see everything. These are, however, the few bright spots in a film that never seems to get going.
Whannell’s direction in Wolf Man lacks the visual creativity of Upgrade or the brilliant ratcheting up of suspense from The Invisible Man. Stefan Duscio’s cinematography seems deliberately muted, presenting what should be a beautiful setting and making it seem somehow dull, which I’m sure was a choice, but it’s a baffling one. Another choice is to make Blake in his werewolf form just look like a hairy guy with fangs and claws, which fails to make him particularly scary. Transformation sequences are the highlights of lycanthropic classics such as The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, but the representative scene here seems like more of a shrug – Blake doesn’t seem very different after it’s over.
I feel that the main problem with Wolf Man is with Whannell’s script. One of the best things about his earlier Invisible Man is that it was about something more than simple scares: abusive relationships, stalking and the difficulty women sometimes have being taken seriously by police and others in authority. This film attempts to do the same thing – it focuses on the legacy of generational violence and trying to break out of that pattern – but in this case the theme and the movie don’t mesh as successfully. It has a good line about it – “Sometimes you’re so scared of your kids getting scared that you become the thing that scares them.” – but the clear good intentions behind Wolf Man unfortunately don’t result in an effective film.