Wolf Man Review
“Sometimes when you're a daddy, you're so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them.” – Blake


I do love a monster movie, but then if you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’ll know that. And when you add that this is a Universal film, in tandem with Blumhouse Productions AND the director is Leigh Whannell who has previously helmed Universal/Blumhouse’s The Invisible Man five years ago – this is a perfect storm of creativity. This can’t fail to be an all-time classic, guaranteed to send me on my merry way home from the multiplex with a grin. Plus, who doesn’t love a werewolf movie? They’ve been a staple of horror/monster movies since Jack Pierce (no relation) glued yak hair onto Henry Hull’s face in 1935 for Universal’s Werewolf of London.
What can I say? The perfect storm faltered, then feebly petered out before it really got going.
It’s not a remake or an update any of the Universal classics, which is kind of a shame, but we can roll with that. It takes place in rural Oregon. Thirty years after spotting an odd humanoid creature while on a hunting trip with his overbearing, volatile father, Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) has moved to the city and receives a certificate declaring his father dead after going missing in the woods, plus the keys to the family home at the edge of the forest. He decides to take a vacation there with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake and Charlotte are on the cusp of divorce, and this is a last chance for them.
As soon as they arrive, Blake is attacked by presumably a werewolf and begins a slow and agonising metamorphosis. And that’s the plot – practically all of it.
Now that might seem enough for an average werewolf movie because you need your central character to be attacked early on – right? We’re on track so far. Having stayed away from spoilers and looking forward to being impressed with Whannell’s take on the furry fiend having really enjoyed the Invisible Man, I was instead subjected to a film that slowed right down, but with an occasional spark of inspiration here and there to keep my hopes up – and at the point I thought it was improving, it was on its last reel (as we used to say, back in the day.)
Pacing is a bit of a problem here. The bulk of the film takes place on one night – the night they arrive, and ends at daybreak. Blake never really fully transforms in to a full lycanthrope – so we’re not shown a dazzling display of physical effects as we saw in An American Werewolf in London or The Howling (1981). We don’t really care about the character as we did Jack Nicholson in Wolf (1994). We see a semi transformation in different stages, mostly obscured by dark – but to tell the truth, we don’t really care about the characters. We don’t really sympathise with Blake as a victim because Christopher Abbott is honestly, pretty insipid as a performer here. Julia Garner’s performance is from the Kirsten Stewart school of constant resting bitch face. I couldn’t warm to her. The best cast member was Matilda Firth – at least the kid could act.
It also becomes painfully apparent that Wolf Man is a film that’s remarkably light on scares, dread and most importantly, atmosphere. Even the big plot twist/reveal is screamingly obvious from the outset. Whannell seems to have tried to make a werewolf movie with the sensibilities of David Croenenberg’s The Fly (1986) where the focus was on the body horror of having your body mutate into something else. But in The Fly, care was taken to get the audience to empathise with Jeff Goldblum’s plight, as well as that of Geena Davis. Trust me, Abbott and Garner are nowhere in the league of Goldbum and Davis. (It should be remembered also that the transformation in The Fly was a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic of the time.) It would, of course also help is we could actually SEE the transformation in its different stages pretty clearly, but we can’t. Half-lit glimpses of something that seems at one point to resemble Johnny Knoxville’s transformation in Men in Black (2012) then looks a bit Nosferatu-like. But he never goes full-on wolf. If I’m going to see a film called Wolf Man, I’m expecting to see a man turn into a wolf, damn it. Anything else is just false advertising. The Monster Kid in me was pretty disappointed.
It's not ALL disappointing, I mentioned earlier that there were inspired touches, and the main one is that sometimes, we could see Blake’s point of view, with his heightened visual acuity. He’s a lot closer to his prey than they suspect. There’s another scene, but I don’t want to give a spoiler.
All in all, this is pretty much a missed opportunity. I got some of what I expected to see, but I was expecting a lot more than the film delivered. I didn’t even get a full moon…
BUT – as I was leaving, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was on the foyer’s sound system. That made me smile.
Well played, Cineworld. Well played.
Rob Rating = 5