"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VI,
Leigh Whannell's new re-imagining of The Wolf Man loses the definite article at the start and a lot more besides as Wolf Man (2025), a film that has good ideas that it fails to execute to the best of its ability. It's a film that looks at the elements of the werewolf myth and ditches most of the mythology. It drops the silver bullet and the moon and the invulnerability. It keeps the transformation and the contagion at its core, though, things that could be explained away as disease. In doing so, it discovers the kernel of a body horror movie on the Cronenberg model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Fly, with a salting of the generational trauma of The Brood, but with neither of those films' instinct for violating taboos. The most galling thing about it is that Whannell is certainly capable of rising to the challenge. His version of The Invisible Man can stand in the company of Cronenberg's best horror movies unashamed. But this? This is the kind of film that Blumhouse releases in January (Blumhouse is this film's production company). It's not as bad as something like Night Swim, but it's nothing you'll remember once it's out of theaters.
The story follows one Blake Lovell, who we first meet as a child. He lives with his strict father in a house in a remote part of Oregon. His father, Grady, insists that Blake obey him in all things for his own safety. This is important to people who live so far away from other human beings. The woods are dangerous, too. When Blake and his dad are out hunting, Blake approaches a stand of mushrooms, his dad warns him that they are death cap mushrooms and will kill him dead. When a deer crosses their path, Blake wanders away to get a better shot, but sees something else in the scope. His dad freaks when he realizes that his son has wandered off. When he finds him, they both realize they are being stalked by some creature in the woods. Grady tells Blake that it's a bear, but he doesn't believe it. They take shelter in a deer blind and wait for the creature to wander away. That night, Blake overhears his dad on the CB radio telling his neighbor that he spotted the hiker that has gone missing, the one thought to have contracted what the local indigenous peoples call "wolf face." Thirty years later, Blake is a writer in San Francisco. He has a daughter, Ginger, who he loves more than anything, and a wife, Charlotte, with whom his marriage is straining. He's unemployed. She's a successful journalist. When he receives a notification from the State of Oregon that his father has been declared dead after being missing for years, he suggests a trip to take care of his father's estate as a means of patching things up with his wife. He promises them a valley view that will take their breath away. They drive a rental truck to his dad's farm, but before they get there, they take a wrong turn onto the driveway of Derek, one of his dad's neighbors, a man who knew Blake when they were kids. He's standing guard on his own property in a deer blind, but offers to guide them to the correct driveway. He tells them that they should hurry because things get hairy after dark. He says it's because there is no power grid or lights, but he means something else entirely. When they get near the Lovell farm, a figure blocks the road in the dark, causing Blake to veer off the road and into the trees. Derek opens his door and tumbles out onto the ground. Charlotte and Ginger break their window and climb onto the top of the truck. Blake sees...something...grab Derek, and in the scramble to close the door against whatever it was, Blake is wounded. When Blake frees himself, he and his family make a run for his father's house. They barricade inside and hope it's proof against whatever is out in the forest. Blake's wound is worse now, and he starts...changing. Charlotte and Ginger are appalled at the sickness that comes over Blake and as the siege goes on, they begin to wonder if what's outside is worse than what's in their midst...
The best thing in Wolf Man is the actors. Both Christopher Abbott as Blake and Julia Garner as Charlotte are committed to their roles even if the filmmakers don't give them enough meat in the script. Abbott in particular has to navigate a path from caring family man toward ravening monster, and he's mostly up to it. Garner, by contrast, is so under-written that when the time comes to take over the emotional core of the movie--watching someone you love slip away into disease and madness--her character is surprisingly blank. She has three characteristics: mom who could be doing better, journalist (though we never really see her at work, and horrified partner who was dissatisfied with things even before reckoning with lycanthropy. That's the sketch of a character, and the film doesn't plumb deeper. Garner tries--she is a formidable actor when given her head--but there's just not enough. The film's end is dependent on the audience feeling Charlotte's dilemma, but the film hasn't done the work to build that rapport. The film's best performance is given by Sam Jaeger as Blake's dad in the film's prologue. He layers nuance onto a character that might be shallow--the strict dad who scars his son for life. This character has some depth to it. We get why he's the way he is. And he doesn't seem abusive, so much as he seems strict. The downside of this is that it undermines the film's ideas about inheritable trauma (offered in part as a cause of the film's lycanthropy).
In terms of the film's craft, Wolf Man is anonymous. The cool detatchment of The Invisible Man is replicated in the wilderness here with indifferent effect. The color grading and the locale conspire to make the film look a bit like a high-end, shot in Vancouver episode of The X-Files. Even the valley vista that the film uses for effect seems dreary rather than inspiring. This is a film that could have used some sunlight and a more saturated color palette some of the time. The scene at the beginning of the contemporary part of the film, in which Blake and Ginger are out and about in the city has the same monochromatic look as the scenes in the woods. Some differentiation might have gone a long way. The score by Benjamin Wallfisch is likewise. Music can go a long way toward selling a horror movie (hell, look at Friday the 13th for an example of a dreadful film with an absolutely killer score). This film isn't interested. I can't even remember what this score sounded like mere hours after seeing the film. Most scores are sonic wallpaper these days, but this one is particularly forgettable.
It's not all bad, though. The film's opening movement in the past is gripping. It takes full advantage of the isolation of its characters out in the woods and stages a set-piece in a deer blind that has a keen sense of suspense. Heavy breathing was never so menacing. There's an atavistic fear of being stranded in the woods with some dreadful beast circling just out of the firelight that threads through the movie, and it never lets go of that thread even as it flails with its other elements. The film also gets mileage out of the idea that an animal will chew its own limbs off if trapped in two particularly revolting sequences. I also like the way the film depicts the first-person experience of being a werewolf, occasionally shifting between normal human perception and werewolf vision in the same shot. If I could hear the footsteps of a spider as booming sounds, I might go mad, too. These sequences have precedent in werewolf movies of the past. The obvious forerunner of these effects is Wolfen (1981). Wolf Man's notion of lycanthropy as a debilitating disease isn't necessarily wrong, either, nor is the film's intent as a body horror film or even as a domestic drama amplified through the echo chamber of genre. But genre imposes expectations even on films that attempt to subvert it, and those expectations aren't met here.
Werewolf movies usually rise and fall with the design of their monster and of their transformation effects. The greatest werewolf movies are also groundbreakers when it comes to the technical problems of depicting their various monsters, whether Jack Pierce's lap dissolve transformations for Universal in the 1930s or Rick Baker and Rob Bottin's puppeted animatronic effects in the 1980s. There are exceptions, of course. Much as I love Ginger Snaps, I think its werewolf is...not great. One of my favorite werewolves is the one in Van Helsing (2004), even though the film is otherwise an abomination. Werewolf films often struggle to find the right balance between man and wolf. My own ideal werewolf is bipedal but furry, with a wolf's snout and teeth. The ones in The Company of Wolves, for example. I am less keen on the hairless werewolves that occasionally show up in less imaginative or bargain basement werewolf films. The monsters in Wolf Man, alas, fall into this last category. There is nothing in particular to indicate that any of these critters is related to a wolf other than expository text at the beginning of the film, which is lazy. It might have been better off had it gone with the Wendigo myth that is its clear inspiration. This film cannot plead poverty given its provenance. It had the resources to provide a werewolf. I kept expecting the monsters to get wolfier as the film went on and they never did. I kept expecting the transformation, which it prolongs in increments throughout the film without a showstopper sequence. The film is explicitly about the transformation, so minimizing it seems an odd choice. In other words, whatever the filmmakers may have intended in this film is hamstrung by a very large broken promise. People go to werewolf movies to see goddamn werewolves, and I think this film fails at this very basic level. I mean, sure. There are a couple of monsters that you can call werewolves if you like, but only if you squint reallly hard at them. Maybe it's better if you think of this as some other kind of horror movie, which is difficult in a film with the title, "Wolf Man."
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