Wolf Man – A Howling Misfire That Plays It Too Safe

Wolf Man is the latest from writer/director Leigh Whannell, following his 2020 surprise hit, The Invisible Man, a modern update of the 1933 classic loosely based on H.G. Wells’s original novel. Hoping to replicate the success of his last project, the film recycles the formula of retooling an old Universal Monster for the 21st century by attempting to modernize and ground the material. However, it fails to reach those same heights, as it struggles to actualize its sombre dramatic ambitions against its weak thrills, relying on heavy-handed, half-baked allusions to domestic abuse and generational trauma to lend itself an air of self-importance. Without a solid foundation of tension or the maturity in writing to give it proper emotional weight, Wolf Man is exhausting and epitomizes the worst of modern studio horror, landing as one of the weakest horror flicks in years.

The story centers around a remote valley hidden away in Oregon (shot in New Zealand), where audiences follow our protagonist Blake in his youth (Zac Chandler) on a hunting trip with his father Grady (Jaeger) when they have their first encounter with the titular Wolf Man. Cut to thirty years later, and this event has faded from Blake’s memory (Abbott); he has begun associating his childhood with his father’s paranoia and isolation over the event more than with the memory of actual violence. After years of being declared missing, Blake’s father is pronounced deceased, which causes Blake to travel back to his childhood home with his wife, Charlotte (Garner), and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), to confront his past. Shortly after, the Wolf Man enters the picture, and violence ensues as Blake becomes infected. Will Charlotte and Ginger survive the night?

The premise—“a wife and daughter rush against the clock to stay alive and escape the monster and the father”—is strong enough, and its simplicity allows Whannell to dive quickly into the action. Yet after a handful of dimly lit, Jurassic-Park-esque werewolf encounters and brawls, one begins to question how invested Whannell truly is in the horror genre. In The Invisible Man, Whannell successfully channelled tension through the film’s title alone, using an impressive degree of restraint as audiences scanned empty spaces around the frame for the titular menace (before going for broke in a James-Wan-sicko-mode-third-act pivot where the Invisible Man begins collecting bodies). However, in this case, the film’s eagerness to excite early on frustratingly results in a monster with undefined “rules” that carries little bark, bite, or blood as it pounces between predictable and familiar action sequences.

With only a few players on the board, Whannell is precious about doling out any damage to the family, instead focusing on the disintegration of Blake’s family through his deteriorating mind and body. Yet, by skipping the essential building blocks needed to lend weight to its family dynamics, the film falters when it tries to deconstruct them. Separate commentaries on isolation, paranoia, domestic abuse, and generational trauma—themes that modern studio horror frequently leans on to appear more profound in a trend dubbed “elevated horror”—are clumsily shoved into the third act. Taken literally or metaphorically, the film struggles to coalesce these elements into anything meaningful. In its attempt to be taken seriously as a family drama, the film finds itself at odds with the other type of film Whannell seems to enjoy making far more: “Wouldn’t it be wild if your dad was the Wolf Man?”

It’s in these stretches—“What if the transformation from ‘American Werewolf in London’ transpired across an entire film?”—that the film seems to light up the most and temporarily finds its footing in Abbott’s strange, primal physicality, as he occasionally taps into the film’s (perhaps unintentional) pitch-black sense of humour. The design of the Wolf Man is best described as a goblin who grew up in the uncanny valley, eliciting a strange phenomenon as Abbott performs acts of self-mutilation so absurd and horrendous that they’re sure to elicit laughter from an audience either uncomfortable, desperately searching for some levity, or both. These sequences could benefit from a greater sense of clarity, as many of the details and VFX are hidden under darkness, but the change of pace offers a brief bit of personality.

Throughout the shallow characterizations, ham-fisted self-important themes, and the refusal to rip a face-off or two, Wolf Man fails to become the exciting, resonating horror film a modern telling deserves. In the end, Whannell’s Wolf Man is a howling misfire that plays itself too safe, closely replicating the success of The Invisible Man to diminishing results: lost in the murky visuals, inconsistent tone, and inability to recognize that what made his last film exciting was taking a daring, fresh approach.

still courtesy of Universal Pictures

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J.A. Birney

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