Directed by Leigh Whannell | Written by Whannell and Corbett Tuck | 103 min | ▲▲1/2 | Amazon Prime
My expectations for a fresh approach to the lycanthropy myth were stoked by this new film from Australian genre auteur Whannell, especially after he nailed the update to The Invisible Man and its intimate partner violence allegory, and the terrific sci-fi thriller Upgrade.
We’ve been a little starved for this particular horror tale of late. IndieWire published their list of the best werewolf movies, and while a few of the recent ones they choose are unseen by me, I can confirm that the Benicio del Toro and Jack Nicholson ones are stinky, but Ginger Snaps, The Howling, and An American Werewolf In London, those are entirely worthwhile. Wolf Man falls somewhere in the mediocre middle.
This picture is as much a family drama as it is a gothic horror. We have Blake (Christopher Abbott) as a San Francisco unemployed writer and father to cute-as-a-button Ginger (Matilda Firth) and partner to journalist, Charlotte (Julia Garner). Blake and Charlotte’s relationship is strained at least partly because of the demands of her career and that she feels Blake is much more connected with Ginger than she is. In an effort to bring the family closer, Blake suggests they spend the summer in rural Oregon, in a house his father owned before he disappeared. We see Blake and his father’s relationship in an opening segment set years before. Dad struggled with controlling his anger, and he was also well aware of a creature in the woods, which we all recognize as a werewolf. Blake is the next one to get hair growing in unusual places.
Unfortunately, much of this is a little half-baked. The myth of the werewolf is nodded to, but we never really understand where it comes from — nobody onscreen has ever seen a werewolf movie or they’d know a lot sooner they were in one. The suggestion it’s some kind of ancient forest virus, and not a supernatural curse, is a storytelling decision, but how it’s passed on is a little unclear — does Blake catch it accidentally or inherit it from his father? This is also a story where the themes of inherited trauma are waylaid by a second half of attacking-monster-scenes, all of which take place over a single night. The restricted timespan is also a choice, as is the frequency of on-the-nose exposition, but none of it works to help us better understand the particulars of the family dynamics.
The creature effects are impressive, and Whannell and his DP Stefan Duscio do a thing where the camera rotates from the perspective of Charlotte to the perspective of Blake, so we get a sense of how the virus is changing him — providing a glowing, infrared vision. But to what end? Werewolf movies of the past have shared the appeal of turning into an animal, the lusty appetite along with the deadly consequences. Here it’s a disease that takes away your humanity — this may as well be a zombie picture. More’s the shame.
