Wolf Man, Woof

Director: Leigh Whannell Starring: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger Running Time: 103 minutes


As Ireland’s own Lee Cronin prepares to unravel a new take on The Mummy, it might be understandable for him to use Blumhouse’s other reimaginings of classic monster movies as a point of reference., both for the do’s and do-not-do’s. These more grounded, streamlined scares might be an improvement from the infamously botched ‘Dark Universe’, an attempt to turn Universal’s monster squad into a Marvel style shared universe, but making these old stories refreshing and relevant has not been without growing pains.

In 2020 Cronin’s fellow horror specialist Leigh Whannell helmed a revival of The Invisible Man that tied its antagonist to themes of gaslighting and domestic abuse with mixed results, an effectively unsettling film that still felt a little threadbare in its story. The same director’s take on the Wolf Man, in cinemas now, has those same missteps and more, a frustrating waste, in other words, dog shit.

Like a lot of middling modern horror, Wolf Man is bluntly bolted to a theme of trauma, one that it has to reiterate and reinforce so often that the whole movie becomes a miserable, overly literal, parable. In this case, the men who turn into wolves at the full moon are metaphorical stand-ins for cycles of trauma and patriarchal over-protectiveness. We see a young Blake Lovell (played as an adult by Christopher Abbott) anxiously under the thumb of his father Grady (Sam Jaeger), a hunter who lives isolated in the mountains of Oregon, a dour doom-prepper with a bad temper. Grown up, Blake is long estranged from Grady, missing and assumed dead, and although he’s a sensitive and attentive dad to his young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), he still has an angry streak on the inside. That, and a struggle for her to forge her own connection to her daughter, has led to tensions in Blake’s marriage to journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner).

When Blake’s father is finally declared legally dead and he inherits the keys to his childhood home, the doting dad inexplicably decides to bring his wife and daughter along to spend an entire summer at a place he associates only with pain and disappointment, in the middle of nowhere, that he abandoned as soon as he could. It goes wrong immediately. As the family are menaced from outside the house by a mysterious creature that the movie is way too coy about for way too long considering its title is Wolf Man and it opens with a title card describing a local legend of a wolf man, they’re also suffering on the inside thanks to a mysterious illness that befalls Blake and starts to turn matters even more hairy.

a wolf man he’s turning into a wolf man

There is a kernel of an interesting idea of using werewolf tropes to examine toxic masculinity and herd mentality. Wolf Man squanders that for an unambitious narrative that plays out over the course of one night as the family deal with the evil without and within. Though the film draws influence from Cronenberg’s The Fly in its impressively gross transformation sequences, and occasionally shifts into a nifty wolf-vision P.O.V. from Blake that also demonstrates how his affliction is distancing him from his family and humanity, it avoids showing any change in Blake’s actual behaviour, and really in the confined narrative fails to ground us in the characters of Blake and Charlotte, and their marriage, at all. Both actors are trying their best with the material, but when Charlotte tearfully pleads to a deteriorating Blake that he’s her best friend, it’s bafflingly out of line with the little of their relationship that we’ve actually seen. Showing Blake become more aggressive and reactive would make sense, his sensitive city slicker falling in with local brusque brutes would be an effective, if obvious, plotline, but instead we just see him become more ailing and incoherent over one evening, Abbott constrained as an actor beneath increasing special effects.

The project was originally assigned to Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance with Ryan Gosling set to lead. Being a later replacement may explain why Whannell seems disinterested in his film’s own presence, but as a horror vet with effective hits under his belt like Saw and Insidious, he’s unusually ineffective in the film’s actual scares. A sequence with the family trapped on top of a polythene-covered greenhouse, the wolf slashing from underneath as hooks give way and threaten to send them all falling, is shockingly incompetent in how it peters out its tension. Scenes of wolfy Blake fighting the other beast are a cheap, bland CGI mess. The result is a film that’s obvious, overlong and undercooked, a half-moon half-measure that despite some signs never transforms into something greater. We can only hope Cronin is working hard to distinguish himself ahead of the pack.

2 out of 5 stars (2 / 5)
Where to watch The Invisible Man

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