Following Leigh Whannell’s reimagining of The Invisible Man, he returns for Wolf Man. Originally intended to be part of Universal Pictures Dark Universe, which was scrapped after Tom Cruise’s The Mummy failed to meet expectations at the box office, reinterpretations of Universal monster movies are still planned, but as individual stories on a much smaller scale.
In Wolf Man, we’re introduced to a young boy who goes hunting with his father. Their relationship is strained, mostly due to the father’s intimidating parenting. They encounter something on their hunt—not fully animal but not quite man—and nearly succumb to the creature’s bloodlust.
30 years later, that boy is now a man named Blake (Christopher Abbott) who now lives in New York City with his journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake is notified that his father has passed away and has to return to the family farm in Oregon to retrieve his belongings.
Once in Oregon, Blake and his family are attacked and run off the road by a similar creature. While his family makes it to his father’s farm, Blake is wounded and starts to get sick, but his sickness becomes dangerous and inhuman while his family is suddenly no longer safe around him.
Leigh Whannell is no stranger to the genre with Saw and Insidious being other horror franchises he helped shape since their inception. Wolf Man is not what you expect it to be as this isn’t a werewolf film. Most werewolf lore like being affected by the full moon, silver bullets being a weakness, and the typical all-over wolf-like transformation are tossed out the window here.
Written by Whannell and his wife Corbett Tuck, Wolf Man’s first draft was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and specifically being isolated from the rest of the world. This isn’t a monstrous transformation that goes away when the sun comes up, it’s a sickness. The film describes the sickness as a fever with the face of a wolf. Whannell was inspired by David Cronenberg’s The Fly and it shows. Blake’s horrid transition into this rabid, hairy Neanderthal is brutal and disgusting at times.
The most impressive part of the creature design is that it was done practically, but it’s ugly to look at otherwise. Think Jack Nicholson in Wolf, but with less hair and more protruding flesh. Wolf Man is generally more effective when the creature isn’t shown. The opening of Blake with his father hiding in the treehouse in the forest while it rains is so masterfully done. You hear the creature snarling as it claws at the wood paneling and you see its breath to signify just how close it is to jumping on its prey.
If you see Wolf Man, see it either in theaters or somewhere with incredible surround sound. The sound design of the film is a big part of its charm. Not only is this because of the creature, but the forest of the farm in Oregon has a life of its own with crackling thunder, the sound of rain falling all around you, and trees creaking.
Wolf Man essentially stalls after Blake becomes this creature. The story gets him back to Oregon easily enough, but the screenplay can’t decide if Blake still recognizes his family or not. He has this weird wolf vision that allows him to see things in the dark and he suddenly can’t understand English like everything sounds like Charlie Brown gibberish. Blake has a deep connection with his daughter and Wolf Man builds up this, “I love you 3000,” moment between them, but when that moment inevitably comes it falls flat and it's washed away with a disgruntled groan.
One minute Blake is saving his family and the next he’s trying to kill them. It’s supposed to illustrate that he’s losing himself to the sickness and he’s becoming less and less like himself the more he has it. The disappointment from the film is more of how the film is written because the actors are quite good. Julia Garner emotionally carries the film and Christopher Abbott portrays so much with his eyes in his performance underneath the mounds of prosthetics.
Even the finale abruptly stops without much of a conclusion. It’s likely hinting at an open direction for the surviving characters, but a pan out from behind as they look up at the night sky is a little lame.
Wolf Man features some incredible performances from its cast with a heart-racing score that pays tribute to the werewolf films it was inspired by. But even with the film boasting its practical effects, the creature design is ultimately underwhelming and the story runs around aimlessly in the woods because there’s nowhere else for the film to go.
