Wolf Man (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) hereby establishes Leigh Whannell as one of the upper-tier directors of middlebrow horror. He doesn’t helm “elevated” horror like Coralie Fargeat or Robert Eggers, nor does he crank out Scream remakes or grimy slopfests like the Terrifiers. He began his career as James Wan’s creative partner, developing the Saw franchise, writing some of the screenplays for those films and the Insidiouses, then graduating to the director’s chair for Insidious: Chapter 3 and the original technothriller Upgrade. Once Universal’s “classic monsters” reboot, dubbed the Dark Universe, keeled over and croaked in the wake of The Mummy’s commercial failure, he turned 2020’s The Invisible Man into a righteous statement of directorial fortitude – and now does similar work with Wolf Man, casting a couple of heavy-hitters in Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner to headline a movie that might not deserve them, but might at least deserve a watch anyway.
WOLF MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. Gorgeous country up there. Just gorgeous. In the valley of a mist-shrouded mountain is an isolated farm. A generator chugs to keep the lights on inside a little house, where Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger) and his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) live. Maybe 10 years old, Blake is awakened by his father’s stern “ten-hut,” the cue for him to get dressed and make his bed with tight sheets like a soldier in the barracks. Rifles over their shoulders, they set out to hunt for dinner. Grady imparts somewhat paranoid survivalist wisdom upon his son, e.g., “It’s not hard to die. It’s the easiest thing in the world.” And it nearly happens on this morning trek, when, after breathing in the sight of a spectacular valley view, their peace is disrupted by vague echoey growling and the sounds of something gnashing and crashing through the woods. They make it back to the house, where Grady tells his son it was just a bear, although the kid later overhears him on the CB radio saying he saw “you know what.” What exactly is this what? Read the title of the movie, Holmes, that’s what. And it ain’t Just a Bear.
Thirty years later, Blake (Abbott) lives in New York City with his journalist wife Charlotte (Garner) and their grade-school-age daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). The family’s going through a bumpy patch, it seems – Blake’s unemployed but enjoying more time with Ginger, and Charlotte’s overworked and insecure about the parental imbalance. Blake gets a package in the mail, and it’s legal paperwork and a set of keys. His father has been long missing, and declared dead, and Blake has inherited the Oregon property. Hmm. Missing how and in what way, one wonders? I said hmm. Regardless, Blake has complicated feelings, and when Ginger asks him about it, he says of his father, “He always made me afraid of him.” Blake’s idea to freshen up family life is to trek out to Oregon and spend the summer cleaning up the place and soaking up the spiritually replenishing mountain mist. Charlotte wonders how she’ll work and Blake suggests she telecommute, not at all taking into consideration the surely dire wifi situation in a place so far off the grid, the beavers and raccoons’ constitutional laws take jurisdiction.
Nor does he consider the title-of-the-movie situation either. They’re bumping a moving truck down the dirt road getting slightly lost – no phone service up here, of course – looking for the property Blake hasn’t seen in decades. They meet a weird local feller with a rifle who hops in the truck to point the way, much to Charlotte’s discomfort, although we all know she should direct her worry at other things. (Apparently Blake never told her the just-a-bear story, assuming he hasn’t repressed it.) Suddenly, a man-shaped figure appears in the headlights and Blake swerves the truck off the road and down an embankment where it flips on its side and slides down down until it’s wedged between two trees many many feet off the ground. Weird local feller falls out and has his guts removed by something with a vague echoey growl – something that eventually chases Blake, Charlotte and Ginger to his dad’s house and bangs and scratches at the door. Aggro, dude! Once the scene reaches calm for a moment, Blake looks down at the big bloody gash on his forearm. Must’ve cut it on the truck’s broken glass, he says, but Charlotte doesn’t think it looks like that kind of wound. I wonder what kind of wound it is? And if it is what we think it is, what does it mean? That he’ll turn into Just a Bear, I bet!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The more-man-than-wolf design of the wolf man in Wolf Man draws more from the 1941 original The Wolf Man than later movie werewolf iterations, e.g., An American Werewolf in London, which is nevertheless an influence as well, in its application of body-horror practical effects (shout out to the master Rick Baker). And the father-offspring survivalist elements of the story are like Leave No Trace if it was more, you know, werewolfy.
Performance Worth Watching: Even beneath the prosthetics and terrifying amber contact lenses, Abbott brings an unspoken pain and intensity to his performance, acting beneath the all the wolfiness as the character wavers between his compassionate humanity and instinct to kill kill kill.
Memorable Dialogue: Subtext becomes text-text when Blake tells Ginger, “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so scared of your kids getting scars you become the thing that scars them.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The unseen psychological transformation, the inner battle Blake wages with himself, is what gives Wolf Man its middleweight depth. It’s not a profound conflict, but a convincing one, made so by Abbott’s intensity and commitment to performance (he doesn’t shy away from difficult or horrifying material, as we’ve seen in Possessor and James White). Nor is the parents-can-be-inadvertent-monsters metaphor at the heart of the film, which delivers a sins-of-the-father story with a heavy hand. To say Whannell and co-scripter Corbett Tuck’s screenplay is thematically unambitious is a bit of an understatement, but in the greater context of the horror genre, where films’ ambitions often range from let’s be gross to let’s be REALLY gross, at least the film gives us a little nutritious meat on the bone to masticate.
Some will inevitably wave off Wolf Man for forgoing werewolf traditionalism – it shrugs off the classic lycanthropic mythos, doesn’t deliver gnarly kills and doesn’t check the box and gives us a full-blown vein-popping crackity-bones transformation sequence. That’s the likely perspective of Horror Movie Sickos who drag their expectations kicking and screaming wherever they go, and those people should can it. Wolf Man’s gradual bits-and-shivers man-to-wolf transformation fits the central metaphor; you don’t stumble upon the reality of your subconscious parenting strategies with the sudden emergence of the full moon, you know. Which isn’t to say what Whannell concocts is at all transformational for the subgenre, like one might hope. It’s a touch bland at times, but it boasts enough chilling moments, and at least defies the norm in enough ways to be interesting.
And so Whannell stages what’s essentially a rather taut cat-and-mouse thriller that makes the most of its 103 minutes, the director showcasing economic storytelling and strong visual dynamics (the latter is prevalent when the director cleverly transitions points-of-view from that of a normal human to a wolf man’s enhanced aural and visual sensations). The film’s welcome strain of psychological depth is evident in scenes where Charlotte and Ginger stare down their husband/dad as he slowly becomes something else, loses his ability to verbally communicate and wavers precariously between trustworthy and dangerous. This is the thin line between help and harm, and by extension love and hate, made terrifyingly tactile.
Our Call: Wolf Man ultimately delivers more than it doesn’t. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
