Wolf Man is far too tame to be frightening
Universal’s Dark Universe, a planned Marvel-style franchise premised around the studio’s stable of classic monsters, was pronounced dead on arrival after the release of 2017’s frightful bore, The Mummy. Yet those creatures of the night have still snuck in through the back door thanks to Blumhouse, the powerhouse production company behind the Insidious movies and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
In 2020, they released Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which traded thundering spectacle for sleek, intimate horror, honouring the metaphorical terrors of HG Wells’s original novel, while transforming them, too, into an entirely new story about a woman’s attempts to free herself from the hold of an abusive partner. Whannell now returns with a follow-up (Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin will soon tackle a Mummy revival), that’s predicated on the same idea: to honour George Waggner’s 1941 classic The Wolf Man, while turning an eye to modern preoccupations. And, most importantly, to modern fears.
While its origins lie in a (now presumably revamped) pitch from Ryan Gosling, who departed the project in 2023, you can see much of Whannell’s DNA here. There’s a sincere commitment to craft, atmosphere, and character. Yet The Invisible Man’s central metaphor was simple but visceral, crawling up into the unguarded spaces of its audience’s psyche like a cockroach. Here, it’s as if the right words have been placed in the wrong order, leaving us with a jumbled sentence to unpick and nothing at the end but a sincere and confused, “Huh?”
Lycanthropy, as Claude Rains states in the 1941 film, is an expression of “the good and evil in every man’s soul”, the wrestle between human and animal. Whannell, with his co-writer and wife Corbett Tuck, has tried to pin that idea onto more concrete realms of fatherhood, survival, and the ever-present threat that one is destined to turn into their parents. Blake (Christopher Abbott) suffered through a militaristic childhood out in the Oregon forests, raised by a survivalist father (Sam Jaeger) who disappeared at some point after he left home. After his dad is formally declared dead, Blake returns from the city with his journalist spouse Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth).
However, a humanoid creature attacks the family and takes a healthy chomp out of Blake’s arm. Dry skin progresses to hair loss and, eventually, a new set of teeth and claws. Charlotte and Ginger wrestle with the dawning realisation that they have a monster in their own home. With Garner dressed in a checkered shirt and turtleneck, eyes wide and hands gripped around the handle of a knife, the uniform of Shelley Duvall in The Shining (1980), it’s clear Wolf Man has those same aspirations towards spiralling madness. “Sometimes you’re so scared of your kids getting scars you become the thing that scars them,” Blake warns his child, as he neatly presents the film’s intended thesis to the audience.
But Abbott, who showed he can do monstrous perfectly well in last year’s Poor Things, never grows ballistic or cruel enough to frighten: as a human, he apologises profusely for a temper we never really see him wrestle with, and as a werewolf he’s positively tame. Although the prosthetics here are technically impressive, the overall wolf design is so torn between paying homage to Lon Chaney Jr’s original and avoiding any similarity to the pinnacle of the genre, An American Werewolf in London (1981), that the result looks oddly like one of those deep-sea blobfish. Yet this shouldn’t be the nail in the coffin for Universal’s monsters. Whannell has the right idea. Wolf Man just needed a little more time in the lab.
Dir: Leigh Whannell. Starring: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger. Cert 15, 103 mins.
‘Wolf Man’ is in cinemas from 17 January
