Film Review: Wolf Man

Wolf Man
Director: Leigh Whannell
Blumhouse Productions, Cloak & Co.
In Theaters 01.17

It’s January again, which means that theaters are serving holiday leftovers, along with the occasional half-baked dish with no nutritional value that usually features Gerard Butler as the main ingredient. It’s also inevitably when we get our first horror film of the year; This time it’s Wolf Man, which has writer-director Leigh Whannell making his second foray into modernizing the classic Universal Pictures monsters.

Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott, Sanctuary, Poor Things) is a husband and father living in San Francisco with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner,The Assistant) and their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth, Disenchanted, Subservience). Blake led a troubled childhood in rural Oregon with a temperamental, militaristic survivalist father, Grady (Sam Jaeger, Hart’s War, The Handmaid’s Tale), and a bizarre legend of a strange, wolf-like creature who roams the forest.  Grady disappeared in the woods one day, never to return, and Sam tries not to think about him or repeat his pattern of controlling behavior and explosive outbursts. When Blake receives a letter telling him that Grady has finally been declared legally dead, Blake decides to take the family to his old home to settle his father’s affairs, seeing it as an opportunity for the family to spend some much needed time together. When a violent attack by an unseen animal leaves Blake injured, the family is forced to barricade themselves inside the farmhouse. As the night unfolds, Blake begins to exhibit disturbing changes, leaving Charlotte to confront a harrowing truth: the greatest danger may not lie outside their home, but within it.

As he did with The Invisible Man, Whannell uses Wolf Man as a metaphor-laced fable to explore serious subjects — in this case, emotional abuse, the cycle of abuse and the danger of letting your fear and the burden of responsibility of protecting your child from the world’s monsters turn you into a monster. This is all heavy stuff for what is ultimately an unabashedly silly B-movie, and once again, it makes for an ambitious but uneven mix. 

The suspense and jumpscare sequences are entertaining, with a stylistic approach that owes a little to Alfred Hitchcock and a lot to Steven Spielberg. In fact, more than once in the film, I found myself trying to figure out if a sequence was meant as an homage to Jurassic Park or was just ripping it off —the most extreme example being an extended set piece involving a car landing in a tree. The rather simple plot set up allows most of the film to focus on suspense and action, as well as the occasional moment of shocking gore, including a self referential bit that recalls Saw (2004), which Whannell wrote, though this one is smart and a clever use of wolf lore. The film fares better when it’s simply trying to be escapist entertainment: the more mature themes feel forced and the metaphors quite obvious and heavy-handed. Whannell doesn’t do subtext, he holds the text right up to your face and mansplains it.

Abbott is an actor whose presence tends to pique my interest. While this is hardly one of his best performances, he not only brings presence and humanity to the role, but he has some great monstrous moments that could have easily missed the mark with a lesser actor in his place. Garner is very effective in an underwritten role, and her job is mostly to make us scared by playing scared herself, and both play very nicely opposite Forth. Jaeger’s performance is intentionally somewhat one-dimensional, as we are seeing the character through the eyes of young Blake (endearingly brought to life by Zac Chandler), and it works for the character and the story.

Wolf Man isn’t that must-see, visionary piece of horror storytelling that Universal wants you to believe it is by any means, but it’s decent popcorn fare. The thin story feels a bit padded out, even at a lean 103-minute runtime, but it’s a solid enough effort for genre aficionados, even if the attempt to give it a meaningful message lacks some bite. —Patrick Gibbs 

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