Universal Pictures
Anyone expecting Wolf Man, the latest horror film from filmmaker Leigh Whannell, to be a creature feature classic should be warned that the film is both not particularly about a creature and only barely a feature film.
‘What’s wrong with daddy?’ asks the young Ginger as she watches her father slowly grow bloated, wet with sweat, and oozingly pimply. A werewolf bite? Only kinda sorta. The real problem?
Daddy issues.
Cinematic monsters have gone through a number of phases, ebbs and flows that have responded to culture at large. They were some of the earliest successes in silent film (Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein, Nosferatu), before literary adaptations became Universal Studios’ calling card in the ’30s and ’40s. British company Hammer Films made monsters sexy in the ’60s and ’70s before they went commercial and sterile in the monoculture of the ’80s — filmmakers like Coppola and Jordan responded, in turn, by playing up the sexy gothic qualities again in their ’90s films. The new millennium brought leather-clad sex symbols, but the horror trend of the past few years has been the literal manifestation of personal trauma: The Babadook is largely about mental health, and Hereditary is about grief, for example.
Director Whannell, eager to break out of the gross-out mold he crafted for himself and his Saw franchise, turned to The Invisible Man in 2020 for his version of this trend. In that film, Elisabeth Moss battles an evil force that no one else can see — domestic abuse in her relationship. It was a thrilling film, creative and different enough to be noteworthy. It was also the last movie that I, and many others, saw in theaters before the lockdown. Its cultural presence was just hampered by the pandemic. Wolf Man, on the other hand, is hampered by not being very good.
Christopher Abbott plays Blake, a stay-at-home dad, and although he both seems to enjoy it and is pretty good at it, he considers himself a writer who’s just ‘in-between jobs’. His wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), a working journalist, is the breadwinner of the family, and while Blake doesn’t openly resent her for it, their family dynamic is on the fritz. When Blake receives a letter from the State of Oregon that his father, long estranged and considered missing for years, has been declared officially dead, he thinks it would be nice to get away to his childhood home in the country for some quality family time and soul searching. It will not be nice.
Thanks to an extended prologue, we already know that his father (Sam Jaeger) had been hunting a mysterious beast that lurks in the woods near their secluded home for years. They first spotted it when Blake was just a boy and we’re led to believe that this Moby Dick-esque obsession is what drove his father to isolation and his eventual disappearance.
Universal Pictures
After they arrive, it won’t take long for Blake to get bit by this monster and become the new titular Wolf Man. The rest of the film plays out throughout their first night on the farm and it’s all pretty much just one long scene with the occasional short jump in time. As a result, it feels like the climax to a better movie played out at half-speed. Most of the film is Abbott’s character slowly wolfing out while Garner (after her performances in The Assistant and Royal Hotel, she seems to be crafting quite the career of looking disgusted in the company of men) tries to protect their daughter from whatever it is that he’s becoming. She doesn’t know that he’s turning into a wolf man, but we do, so every time they ask him or each other what’s happening, which seems to be most of their dialogue, you become exhausted by the restraint of not being able to yell at the screen loud enough for them to hear you.
Werewolf film fans also come with an expectation that the transformation sequence will be a highlight of the movie. From Lon Chaney Jr. to Michael J. Fox, with An American Werewolf in London and The Howling as the shining examples, it’s something you’re expected to deliver. Since most of the film is one long transformation, we never get that single moment where his feet (well, paws, I suppose) bust out of his shoes or anything like that. Instead, he just swells up and looks like he’s caught a fever. Those buying a ticket to see Christopher Abbott hopefully look as much like Christopher Abbott for as long as possible should know that it’ll take about 45 minutes before he starts looking like Gary Busey. Then he’ll look like David Bradley as Argus Filch in the Harry Potter movies before he eventually resembles a wolf man.
For good reason, January has earned a reputation among film fans as the month where studios scrape the bottoms of the barrels. After the critical darlings and awards bait films arrive scattershot before the year ends, we’re treated to (and occasionally punished with) genre pictures of all shapes and sizes with modest theatrical expectations. Production company Blumhouse has pegged January as a month usually without competition, which is why they’ve delivered movies like M3GAN and Night Swim in years past. You would think, however, that Universal Studios would be more protective over their monster properties considering that Dracula, Frankenstein, and company are synonymous with their brand. It makes sense then that this film was initially scheduled for October — which would, of course, have been the perfect time. We can only imagine that studio execs and suits saw early screenings of this one and knew that it had January all over it.
Wolf Man has a run time of 1 hour 43 minutes, and is rated R for bloody violent content, grisly images and some language.
Universal Pictures
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