Wolf MAn Review

Evan D.

Shortly after being attacked and infected by a wild animal in the woods, Blake (Christopher Abbott) looks to console his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth,) who was understandably shaken by the events. He apologizes, explaining that sometimes fathers try so hard to protect their children from scars that “they end up being the ones scarring them.” For the director that smartly turned The Invisible Man into a meditation on believing women, this brief moment felt like the first thread of an idea that never fully forms in Wolf Man. 

​Leigh Whannell’s second adaptation of a classic movie monster begins with a young Blake (Zac Chandler) on a hunting trip with his dad (Sam Jaeger) in rural Oregon. A curious kid, Blake is scolded harshly by his father for just about anything he does. After a run in with a dangerous creature in the woods Blake returns home to his mom as his dad becomes completely obsessed with the beast that nearly killed his son. Years later, with his dad declared dead, Blake takes his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter back to those same woods to clear out the old cabin. It is not long before familiar frights come to stalk Blake and turn him into the very beast his father taught him to fear. 

Buried in that story, so deep down that it barely registers, is the kernel of a story about generational trauma. Blake, to some degree does become a version of his estranged father. He gets angry trying to protect his kid and falls on marital problems, just like his old man. Using the architecture of the Wolfman story would make sense to represent being infected by the worst parts of your childhood and returning that pain onto your own children. Whannell’s film is just sparsely interested in executing on that.

With Abbott spending half the movie in a painfully slow transformation into the titular Wolf Man, his arc gets cut short. No longer able to really communicate or emote under the (very bad) makeup, we never get to see a payoff for his character as a parent or husband. Instead Garner takes over as the lead despite almost no development of her Charlotte beforehand. So many threads — their marriage, Charlotte’s writing career or her relationship to Ginger — are just left dangling as the film becomes a more classic monster horror chamber piece. 

So many of these issues would be forgivable if too if the craft was even passable. Plenty of horror films get by on the back of a cool monster or clever scares. The biggest sin of Wolf Man may simply be that it just is not scary at all. Abbott’s transformation is slow and played as more of a puzzle than a threat. Whannell, often an inventive director, augments Blake’s new wolf senses with a bizarre, distracting infrared-like filter. His wolf form is nearly hairless and even looks plastic-y at times. It does not help either that everyone on screen seems to understand the quality of the production they’re a part of. Dialogue is unconvincingly written and performed with wanting enthusiasm. All of these factors combine into a film that feels goofier than it is scary. 

Wolf Man is ultimately a total misfire for Whannell and a disappointing  one given his track record. For all the ways he was able to unlock The Invisible Man, he seems completely confounded here. Worse, the film is littered with the outlines of a story that could have worked with better execution. Not scary enough to be effective horror and not smart enough to overcome that, Wolf Man fails to take a bite out of its classic material. 3/10