'Wolf Man' Review: Leigh Whannell's Latest Doesn't Howl Like It Used To

The cast tries to muster enthusiasm for a weak script

Director Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man was a strong experiment in reconfiguring Universal’s crop of monsters for a 2020 audience (particularly after massive misfires like Tom Cruise’s Mummy and the destruction of the Dark Universe). Whannell’s ability to create a contemporary monster, and take the themes of invisibility and use that to tell a story of abuse and gaslighting felt very au courant.

Unfortunately, nearly all of that is missing from his next Universal monster endeavor, Wolf Man. All the nuance and panache of how Invisible Man used its monster is flattened here with a film that telegraphs it’s theme from a mile away and, because of that, has to fill in the time with lifeless characters. More a short film than a feature length movie, Wolf Man shows there might not be any life left in the old dog.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a mild mannered guy struggling to raise his daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth) better than his own father raised him. When his father is officially declared dead Blake is tasked with returning to his old home, alongside Ginger and his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner). But when the trio are set upon by a mysterious creature, and Blake ends up bit, he starts to transform into something that threatens the life of his family.

There are glimmers of something fascinating within Whannell and co-screenwriter Corbett Tuck’s script that, if they existed, appear smoothed out or removed for some unexplainable reason. The film opens with a young Blake living in a clearly abusive household with his father who reiterates to him that if Blake isn’t careful it will result in Blake getting hurt. This statement is two-fold. Blake’s father clearly is worried about his son’s safety to the point of paranoia, and also if Blake doesn’t listen his father will respond with violence. The idea that abuse can be couched under the guise of protection is interesting, and had the movie decided to expand that out — either through young Blake’s story or once grown-up Blake appears — there might have been something.

Instead, after a wonderfully tense scene of young Blake and his dad hiding in a deer blind, their first interaction with the creature of the title, the movie flashes ahead 30 years. Blake clearly lives with the same fear for his daughter, but he routinely apologizes for any overt display of anger. This could have been fascinating to explore — how one man’s feelings in inadequacy manifest into trauma and abuse — but for a movie called “Wolf Man,” the desire is to get there quickly, so anything unnecessary is excised. Blake’s adult life seems to be non-existent. Christopher Abbott gives us shades of a man with violence lying somewhere within him. When his daughter refuses to listen to him on a busy street he curses at her and asks “Why don’t you listen to me?” But that’s the only thing.

Once the pair get home, and Charlotte arrives, the movie seems to have a time limit on how much can be devoted to their backstory. Charlotte is a journalist who clearly cares more about her work. Her marriage to Blake has all the chemistry of roommates. Almost immediately Blake gets the call to return home and outside of one conversation with Charlotte about not getting divorced the movie is off and running. The problem is we have zero understanding of why these two characters would stay together in the first place. They don’t appear to have anything in common, except a child. Abbott and Garner also don’t really give off any romantic twinges towards each other. The movie could have had them as brother and sister and it’d be just as effective.

And it’s a shame as Julia Garner’s Charlotte could have been a great foil to Blake. She’s tough (or at least she describes herself as such) and he’s soft. The exploration of a man feeling emasculated by his alpha wife, again, has the potential for some real intriguing exploration from a horror perspective (even if it would have felt WAY too relevant today). Instead, Charlotte is more concerned with bonding with Ginger than her husband.

This breathless quality continues when they get to Blake’s hometown in Oregon. They immediately meet a former (friend?) acquaintance of Blake’s and after driving just a few feet down a road are confronted with the creature. This is where the movie veers into straight-up monster movie fuel, eschewing any real sense of metaphor. Blake starts changing and Charlotte is placed in the position to keep her daughter safe. The movie sets this up less as lycanthropy and, as the opening text describes, some type of virus called “Hills Fever.”

There are some good gore effects as Blake starts spitting out teeth and gnawing on his limbs, but treating this more like a virus than a curse (as in the original 1941) feature doesn’t have the same punch. It also means Charlotte and Blake spend the entire second half of the movie severed, so there’s no ability to explore the changing dynamic in their marriage or their relationship. When Charlotte tells Blake she loves him it’s more the reassurance someone tells another who is dying than a true declaration. It’s easy to presume there’s a good 30 minutes of this movie somewhere that gave Charlotte and Blake’s relationship more development.

Wolf Man hits the expected notes but the whole doesn’t have much howl in it. Invisible Man worked for how strong its script was and how it balanced that with the scares. Wolf Man goes for the scares and nothing else. Abbott and Garner try their damndest to make it work and, if anything, hopefully Whannell comes back for another Universal monsters entry to get back to basics.