Neither wolf nor man or wolf-man, writer-director Leigh Whannell’s (The Invisible Man, Upgrade) latest contribution to the oft-rebooted Universal Monsters universe mixes straight-up domestic drama, lycanthropy as a metaphor for disease and mortality, and an isolated location perfect for a modestly budgeted, low-risk, potentially high-reward horror-thriller (a Blumhouse Productions specialty). Unfortunately, Wolf Man runs with those ideal ingredients but to rapidly diminishing, middling results.
Once better known as James Wan’s (Malignant, The Conjuring series) creative partner on the commercially successful Saw and Insidious series, and as an occasional actor, Whannell struck out on his own with 2018’s Upgrade, a satisfyingly grim, grimy sci-fi/horror hybrid. It doubled as a borderline nihilistic cautionary tale about our over-dependence on and willingness to cede personal autonomy to technology. He took a significant leap forward as the writer-director of 2020’s Invisible Man. This cannily clever, post-#MeToo horror film reframed H.G. Wells’s story and followed a mentally unstable inventor-scientist as he used his invention to stalk, harass, and gaslight his ex into losing both her sanity and her freedom.
Each film in Whannell’s recent run as writer-director has, in turn, doubled as a stealth study of contemporary masculinity and its discontents. A man turned bitter and resentful by a disabling accident, fixated on becoming whole again and turning his revenge fantasy into reality, losing himself in the process. The tech inventor/entrepreneur treats people, specifically his ex-lover, as an object to own and control, their agency and autonomy immaterial to the needs of the man at the centre of it all.
Where the male protagonists of both Upgrade and Invisible Man willfully choose paths that ultimately lead to their doom, the central character in Whannell’s latest film, Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott), doesn’t. Like every werewolf/wolf-man character before him, Blake doesn’t choose to be bitten or scratched, the curse chooses him, turning him into a tragic figure, his humanity replaced by an atavistic, feral animality. Worse, his wife, Charlotte (Julie Garner), and their preteen daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), become the targets of his emergent beast.
Whannell, however, undercuts Blake’s tragic fate by introducing him, first as a preteen hunting the Oregon woods with his survivalist father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), and thirty years later (Abbott), as a stay-at-home dad to his daughter. Rage and resentment simmer under Blake’s barely controlled persona, the likely, though unspecified, result of generational trauma and a failing career as a writer. That hint of emasculation, legit or not, colours Blake’s relationship with Charlotte, a successful journalist and presumably the sole means of income.
When Blake receives word of his long-estranged father’s apparent demise and his inheritance, the middle-of-nowhere home Blake vaguely remembers from his youth, he pushes hard for a temporary family relocation family, promising a fresh start he believes will save his fracturing marriage. Like almost every interaction between Blake and Charlotte, however, Blake’s idea reeks of desperation, a deliberate unwillingness to acknowledge that whatever led to their marriage and parenthood no longer exists. Or if it still exists, it’s far outweighed by the irreconcilable differences between Blake and Charlotte.
In a too obvious, but maybe not obvious enough, metaphor for the state of Blake’s relationship with his family, the trio find themselves in an overturned rental truck, dangerously close to a precipice, their diminished future as a family in even greater peril after Blake swerves to avoid a bipedal animal on the road. That animal is no animal, of course. Or rather, it was human once, but it’s no longer human, and Blake, Charlotte, and their daughter have trespassed on its territory. Blake emerges from the wreckage injured, but alive, guided by his overriding instinct to protect his family from whatever’s hiding in the woods.
That same instinct, however, reflects the well-meaning, if incomplete, lessons Blake learned from his damaged father: He’s so concerned about physical danger that he forgets about the other side of parenting and adult relationships: nurturing, empathy, and reciprocity. Still, a dark night of the soul and the body—as in body horror—follows, with only surviving until dawn (a staple of the genre) offering even the barest hint of hope.
Shot with an over-emphasis on the overwhelming darkness that threatens to engulf Blake and his family, Wolf Man offers the not unexpected mix of shocks, scares, and gross-out moments. Whannell deserves credit for relying on old-school prosthetics and make-up effects, though the wolf-man’s final, scraggly-haired form ultimately underwhelms. Likewise, the surprise-free third act leans too heavily on familiar genre tropes.
Wolf Man opens theatrically on Friday, January 17, via Universal Pictures.
