With The Invisible Man, director and modern master of horror Leigh Whannell brought the Universal Monster kicking and screaming into our modern age – turning the source material by H.G. Wells into an allegory for gaslighting in the wake of a horrifically abusive relationship. For his next trick, an update to the Wolf Man mythos, based on the 1941 Lon Chaney movie of the same name.
As the movie begins, Blake (Christopher Abbott) is all man; protective father of young Ginger (Matilda Firth) and nagging husband to Charlotte (Julia Garner). When his own dad dies, Blake sees it as an opportunity to repair his fractured marriage, setting off to the old man’s remote farmhouse in rural Oregon. After they are attacked by a mysterious creature on the road and Blake suffers a grisly injury to his arm, the family find themselves trapped and under siege. The creature at the door may be a more pressing matter, but Blake has his own thing going on. Specifically, a grotesque transformation from man to wolf… man.
Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck take a similar approach to Wolf Man as the director did with the Invisible one – turning it into a metaphor for male rage and inherited trauma. “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so scared of your kids getting scarred that you become the thing that scars them,” Blake tells Ginger (shortly after crashing their van and getting a man killed before her eyes). As a great man once said, subtext is for cowards.
The Invisible Man was fairly transparent about its true intentions, and there’s no reason that couldn’t have worked here. Unfortunately, the flimsy narrative isn’t enough to support the clumsy metaphor. Blake’s transformation is grotesquely staged (more The Fly than American Werewolf in London) but ultimately underwhelming, and he never feels more wolf than man. Instead, a dull man becomes an equally dull werewolf, trading in passive aggression for a more primal form of toxic masculinity. Abbott sells the sense of torment inside but burns the milquetoast, failing to scare as either man or wolf.
Garner is similarly sedate as the wife lumbered with a resentful husband and mildly bratty daughter. From the action to the creature effects, Wolf Man is an underwhelming take on the mythos, lacking any sense of savagery or scares.
“He just wants it to be over,” one character whispers as Blake’s animal side takes over. He’s not the only one.
WOLF MAN is out in UK Cinemas now.
