Wolf Man: A Review – A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A tepid horror tale that lacks bite. Horror aficionados can wait to watch it on streaming, everyone else can skip it altogether.
Wolf Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, chronicles the journey of a young family of three as they travel to a remote section of Oregon, where they try to stave off a werewolf attack.
Leigh Whannell had some success with his last film, The Invisible Man (2020), which was a modern re-telling of the 1933 Universal Film horror classic of the same name. This time out he attempts to do the same thing with the Wolf Man, a modern re-imagining the 1941 Universal classic The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr.
While Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a box office smash, making $144 million off a $7 million budget, I found the film to be a bit too heavy-handed with its feminist politics…or to be more precise…it’s male-hating politics, which were quite en vogue at the time, the height of the Trump hysteria (or so we hope).
That said, Whannell, who made his bones writing the Saw movies, displayed some nice cinematic flourishes on ocassion in The Invisible Man, so I was intrigued to see what he could do with The Wolf Man without the burden of having to frantically push a cultural and political ideology.
I was also interested in seeing Wolf Man because I just dig monster movies. I absolutely love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Wolf Man, and I’m always fantasizing about those movies being remade in the modern era but somehow being even better. I realize that is a pipe dream, but I dream it nonetheless.
Having recently seen Robert Eggers’ outstanding remake of Nosferatu, which is essentially my monster movie remake dream come to life, I found myself excited to see the new Wolf Man.
Having seen Wolf Man, I feel foolish for having been excited for it. The film isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either. It’s a rather tepid retelling that never really grabs you by the throat and sinks its teeth into you. Its biggest sin is that it is rather blasé and bland.
The film tells the tale of the Lovell family, Blake, Charlotte and their young daughter Ginger (I’d guess she is maybe 9 years old), who live cosmopolitan lives in San Francisco. But Blake grew up with a very strict father deep in the wilds of Oregon, amidst rumors of a beast in the woods that is half-man and half-animal, and he, and frankly the rest of his family, seem pretty unhappy in the city.
While trying to figure out the status of his rocky marriage to Charlotte, Blake gets the official, and apparently long-awaited, death certificate of his father along with keys to his house in remote Oregon. To try and save their marriage, the Lovell’s decide to make a road trip for the Summer up to the Oregon house….and so their tale begins.
As is my wont, I won’t give away any spoilers whatsoever…but instead will speak in generalities.
Here are some issues with the movie.
I recently heard a discussion about werewolves that wondered whether people liked their movie werewolves to be more human than wolf or more wolf than human. I am in the more wolf than human camp, but I understand the opposing argument.
Wolf Man is definitely a more human than wolf movie, and to me that translates into it looking often-times cheap and tawdry. It doesn’t help that the make-up and special effects are, at best, uneven.
There are some very cool effects, for example shots of hands morphing were particularly quite good, but I found the rest of it less than convincing and not the least bit frightening.
Another issue, and this may be a function of the shitty movie theatres we have nowadays, but I thought the film didn’t look very good. The inability for there to be a sharp, distinct contrast between shadow and light was grating, and undermined the effectiveness of the film a tremendous amount.
All of the darkness had a hazy, smoky hue to it, which again, may not be entirely on director Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio, it could be that the projector in my theatre sucked and the idiotic theatre owners refuse to turn the lights in the theatre down all the way – a never ending frustration for me. Regardless of why the film looked so bad, the bottom line is that it looked bad.
The film also fails to fully use its setting to its advantage. The house the family are trapped in is never turned into a claustrophobic hell, as it should have been. In fact, the house seems to get bigger and bigger somehow as the movie goes along. In addition, the film never fully utilizes the inherent horror of the vast forest, particularly at night. This should be an easy thing to do, as anyone who’s ever been in the woods at night can attest, but Whannell seems disinterested in utilizing setting for horrific effect. The inability to use setting for effect leads to a muting and dispersal of tension, which is never good for a horror film.
On the other hand, there were sequences in the film that I thought were very clever, original and worked incredibly well….namely when Whannell lets us see the world through the perspective of the wolf man. This works incredibly well and not only looks really cool (and is pulled off seamlessly) but adds a significant layer of depth and drama to the film.
The cast, which features Christopher Abbot as Blake, Julia Garner as Charlotte, and Matilda Firth as Ginger, are hamstrung by a script that feels rushed, not fully fleshed out and a tad shallow.
Garner is a remarkable actress as she well established in her Emmy-winning turn on Ozark, but here she feels criminally underused, and dare I say it, slightly miscast.
Matilda Firth does her best in the child role, but it’s a child role so the less we see of her the better.
The weakest link though is Christopher Abbot as Blake. Abbot has the most work to do in the film and frankly, he just isn’t up to it. He lacks the charisma, magnetism, vivid inner life, and the primal/paternal power that is necessary for him to thrive in the role.
Ultimately, Wolf Man is a pretty forgettable film that never fully fleshes out the glorious myth at its core or the horror in its heart yearning to break free.
If you’re a horror and/or monster movie fan, I think you can skip this one in the theatres and wait to watch it when it comes to streaming. Besides that, normal movie goers and cinephiles alike have no need to see this movie as it’s a toothless horror film that lacks any and all bite.
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