Just before the pandemic really hit, Leigh Whannell managed to salvage something from the embarrassing ashes of Universal’s failed ‘Dark Universe’ with his hyper-modern reboot of The Invisible Man, taking the classic horror tale, sprucing it up with high-tech gizmos and using it to reflect on concerns about gaslighting and abusive relationships. Now, five years later, he’s trying the same trick with another classic Universal monster in Wolf Man. Sadly, though, this outing is a lot less effective than its predecessor, partly because it feels less confident and direct in its themes, but mostly because it’s much, much less scary.
Stepping into Lon Chaney’s shoes/big hairy wolf feet here is Christopher Abbott (in a role once earmarked for Ryan Gosling) as Blake, a devoted dad to his only daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) whose marriage to journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner) is going through a rough patch. When his long-missing outdoorsman dad is finally declared dead by the state of Oregon, Blake inherits his farmhouse way out in the beautiful but intimidatingly remote wilds of the Pacific Northwest and decides that the best thing for his family will be to up sticks from their city home and spend the summer by the woods that defined his own childhood.
It’s a plan that goes wrong so quickly that it almost feels like a joke (the vast majority of Wolf Man takes place over just one night), Blake and family not even making it to the house before a strange beast forces their truck off the road and into the woods and slashes Blake’s arm. What follows is mostly a single-location horror with the threat looming both outside the house in the form of the werewolf and inside as Blake’s injury starts transforming him into a similar creature, becoming incomprehensible and dangerous to his wife and daughter.
The ever-shifting prosthetics on Abbott make the transformation feel effectively gross and ‘realistic’ as he becomes more and more feral but, outside of this The Fly-esque body horror, Wolf Man just has too much downtime to be consistently thrilling or spooky, while the scares themselves are severely lacking in invention. Similarly, the metaphorical stuff at play relating the wolf transformation to a failing marriage (literalising things like a person you thought you knew changing, a breakdown in communication, and a man’s overprotectiveness becoming a prison) is solid on paper, but middling in execution thanks to bland dialogue and performances.
Not quite cutting deep enough either in its allegory or its more straightforward blood-and-jump-scares business, Wolf Man becomes that most fatal of things for any horror movie – just a bit of a slog. Aside from grisly SFX work and a couple of genuinely interesting and eerie moments where we get to see the world through Blake’s deteriorating eyes (human language and faces distorting and becoming hard to recognise), there’s not enough here that truly grips you, making for a rather throwaway start to 2025’s blockbuster crop.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 