Julia Garner and Christopher Abbott in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell.Photo Credit: Nicola Dove/Univer/Supplied
- Wolf Man
- Directed by Leigh Whannell
- Written by Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck
- Starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Sam Jaeger an Matilda Firth
- Classification 14A; 103 minutes
In his Den of Thieves 2 review from last week, Globe and Mail film editor Barry Hertz noted that January is Hollywood’s dumping ground, time to clean house of the properties that don’t quite fit anywhere else on the calendar: the budding promise of spring, blockbuster demands of the summer, the awards season prestige in the fall. ‘Tis the season to take out the trash, and occasionally enjoy some of the gonzo and undemanding thrills it has to offer.
So here comes Leigh Whannell’s creature feature Wolf Man, which on paper should fit snugly between all that boisterous snarling Gerard Butler is doing in the Den of Thieves sequel and whatever it is Mark Wahlberg is up to in next week’s hitman-on-a-Cessna thriller Flight Risk (directed by Mel Gibson). But Whannell’s Wolf Man is considerably more high-minded than this month typically allows, to a fault. The Saw co-creator’s take on the gothic horror classic feels torn between feeding our appetite for the howling good fun its title promises and offering up instead a sentimental domestic drama about watching a loved one turn into a monster.
Whannell has built a solid reputation for salvaging trash in recent years. He dusted off 80s sci-fi action tropes with 2018′s inventive indie cyborg thriller Upgrade. He then rescued H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man after Universal’s aborted Dark Universe (a planned Marvel-like franchise featuring the studio’s classic monsters) left the project in limbo, giving the thriller, about a woman being gaslit by an unseen force, a satisfying post-#MeToo makeover.
Wolf Man, which hails from that same no-longer shared universe, is a stumble, but one that still contains much of what made Whannell’s past two features click. He’s an excellent craftsman who frames a few delicious jump scares and is just as good at staging prickly conversations between characters, where there’s just enough hair-raising tension lurking beneath mundane pleasantries to be memorable.
The movie’s opening section is a master-class in atmospheric dread. It’s the late 90s in Oregon, where, even in daylight, the moss, mist and chill make for a perfectly terrifying environment to glimpse the condensation from a lurking creature’s warm breath.
A father and son are living isolated in a cabin in the woods. The former, Grady (Sam Jaeger), is aggressively protective over his son Blake (Zac Chandler); so much so that he threatens to do the child more harm (at least emotionally) than the monster hiding in the shadows, known by the local Indigenous community as Ma’iingan Odengwaan (roughly translating to wolf face in Ojibway).
After that beautifully patient setup, close encounter with the creature included, the movie jumps ahead 30 years. Blake (played as an adult by It Comes At Night’s Christopher Abbott) is now living in New York, estranged from his father, and has grown into a protective parent to his own precocious daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), wary of passing along his generational traumas.
Blake is the homemaker while his journalist wife Charlotte (Ozark’s Julia Garner) is the breadwinner. There’s a rift in their marriage. Whannell and his actors do lovely work sketching out the emotional distance between the couple, along with the yearning for renewed intimacy. But the movie doesn’t find the time to live in their awkwardness, often rushing along and pressuring its characters to narrate stuff that’s better left unsaid.
Whannell’s tight grip begins to slip when Blake whisks his family back to Oregon, to collect his father’s things after the state officially declares the missing man deceased. They’re back in the woods, a still imposing setting in the director’s hands where even a wary local’s friendliness can feel threatening. And then comes the startling reunion with a creature that claws and ultimately infects Blake.
Here the movie shifts into body horror that has a lot on its mind as Blake is humiliated by his shape-shifting anatomy; the infection has him gnawing at his own ghastly wound, spitting out his teeth, losing control of his bladder and, of course, growing fur. Whannell has said in interviews that writing the first draft while quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic subconsciously influenced the way he shaped this story. We’re watching a family go stir crazy while something deadly infiltrates their home after all. But Blake, in the throes of transition, literally spells out what this movie’s really about. After losing the ability to speak, he scrawls a word on paper: “dying.”
Wolf Man is a Cronenbergian-inspired take on grief, anticipating the master’s own superior exploration of watching a loved one decay in his upcoming The Shrouds. Whannell turns Blake’s transformation, caused by a sudden and monstrous illness, into a palliative melodrama.
But as sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.
Whatever its failures, Wolf Man just doesn’t belong in the trash.
