Wolf Man
Writer: Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck
Director: Leigh Whannell
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
Leigh Whannell knows how to make good horror. On a scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot level, there are few directors in the genre right now who can claim to do it better, and we have the evidence readily available. Whether we're talking about his writing abilities on films like Saw and Insidious or his directorial prowess in The Invisible Man, it's clear that this is a filmmaker who knows how to wind us up and then unleash all the tension he's built in outbursts of tremendous, unforgettable terror.
That means that even a misfire from Whannell is bound to be interesting, and his latest, Wolf Man, definitely fits into that category. A reboot of Universal Pictures' classic werewolf creature, the film promises to take Whannell's knack for character work, gift for tension, and thoroughly contemporary style and infuse them into an iconic movie monster. It's a blend that'll make horror fans everywhere salivate, but sadly, this time all that anticipation turns into a letdown, a movie with a lot of interesting ideas and directions that refuses to bite deep enough into any of them to really draw blood.
This time around, the "wolf man" of the title is Blake (Christopher Abbott), a writer and stay-at-home dad who loves his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) fiercely, and worries that he's growing distant from his wife, hardworking journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner). So, when Blake learns that his long-missing father has been declared legally dead and the family farm in the wilds of Oregon is now his, he sees an opportunity. The family can leave the hustle of San Francisco and get away for a while. They can spend the summer at the farm, grow closer, be a family in ways that Blake and his rough-around-the-edges single dad never got to be.
Unfortunately, it doesn't turn out that way. Right from the start, the trip is doomed when the moving van crashes and, in the chaos, Blake is scratched by a mysterious humanoid creature that he may or may not recognize from his childhood. Barricaded inside the farmhouse to keep the creature out, Blake begins changing into something not quite human, leaving Charlotte and Ginger desperate to find a way out of the woods, and terrified that the man they know is disappearing.
This is a very promising start. The script, by Whannell and Corbett Tuck, lays a lot of really solid groundwork for the horror to come, touching on everything from Blake's fear that he's inherited his father's temper to Charlotte's fear that she's not close enough to her own child — then taking all of that rising tension and planting it in the middle of a secluded farmhouse a la Night of the Living Dead. You've got the exploration of familial cycles of violence and darkness, you've got neat little play on traditional gender roles, you've got a great single-location thriller setup, and you've got a werewolf. What could go wrong?
Good news first: This is still a Leigh Whannell movie, and his craft instincts for wringing maximum terror out of a sequence are still very much on-point. Together with cinematographer Stefan Duscio and editor Andy Canny, Whannell makes Wolf Man a world of hostile shadows, where every tree, every deer blind in the woods, every corner of an old dark house could harbor some hostile being.
As he did in Invisible Man, Whannell lets his camera linger patiently over scenes when the terror is really ratcheting up, and even lets it drift into unexpected angles, suggesting a creature might leap out at you even when there's nothing there. The film's opening sequence, a father-son hunting trip flashback which shows us a younger Blake, is a wonderful example of all of these things — plus tremendous sound design by P.K. Hooker — working together to create a coiled spring, an animal with its hackles up and its teeth bared, ready to pounce.
The trouble is that Wolf Man is never able to make much out of these promising ingredients. As the action kicks in, and we understand what's happening to Blake, the film attempts to simultaneously deliver a body horror slow-burn and a fulfilling character drama about a family going through the unimaginable, but these things never quite click together, and what's worse, some of the promising elements of the setup start to fall by the wayside. This is certainly not the fault of the cast, who are all capable and all delivering solid work — particularly Abbott, who's asked to spend much of the film in a mute, dazed state in which he can't quite figure out what's happening to him. It's not even the fault of the craft team, who imbue even the film's more strained portions with a sense of competence and even beauty that makes the end result all the more frustrating.
So, what's happening here? How did one of the best horror filmmakers working right now end up with a defanged shadow of a movie? Setting aside any potential hurdles put up by the production process, Wolf Man just ends up being a film that wants to be too many things, and therefore ends up being none of them. Is it about cycles of familial violence and inescapable fate? Is it about the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love? Is it about the horror of realizing you're turning into the very thing you hate? Yes … and no … and also maybe some other things, and they're all crammed into about 100 minutes of a movie that only occasionally remembers that it's also a creature feature. There were good, even lofty intentions here, and Wolf Man, like a feral beast, wanted to tear into every single one of them. As a consequence, it's a directionless, if competently made, exercise in glancing blows, and a horror film that, by the time the credits roll, seems to have lost its bite entirely.
