‘Wolf Man’: The Horrors of Losing Your Humanity

With nearly 100 years of cinematic history that has included numerous failures and false dawns in the 21st century, it would seem there isn’t much new ground to be covered when it comes to the iconic Universal Monsters. But in February of 2020, just a few years after the colossal failure of the ill-fated Dark Universe and just as the world was on the precipice of descending into the chaos of COVID-19, the monsters got the reinvention they desperately needed.

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man reframed the “grotesque romance” of both H.G Wells’ novel and the 1933 film adaptation into a darker story of a woman escaping domestic abuse and how her trauma quite literally followed her wherever she turned. It proved to be a stroke of genius as it was both the Blumhouse blueprint for how to make a low-budget blockbuster in the modern studio system, but more impressively, was a showcase of Whannell’s ability to effectively use the paranoid thriller/horror genre as a sort of trojan horse for a timely feminist parable. So when it was announced he’d be tackling another classic monster from the Universal catalog, excitement and expectations were elevated, even with the oft-dreaded January release date for Leigh Whannell’s spin on the Wolf Man.

We open with an intriguing prologue chronicling a father and his young son, Blake. While out hunting near their home in the forests of Oregon, they have a dramatic and terrifying encounter with a mysterious creature the local indigenous tribes call “the face of the wolf.” Blake’s father sets out to hunt the creature, but never returns. 30 years later, an adult Blake (Christopher Abbott) is now a writer and stay-at-home dad in San Francisco with his journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Already the film gets off to a wobbly start as it spends far too long establishing these characters that are more or less dull archetypes, with Charlotte as a workaholic mother who feels distant from her daughter and Blake as the overprotective girldad who has her constantly wrapped in cotton wool. This dichotomy has put their marriage on a knife’s edge. It doesn’t help when these scenes are full of clunky dialogue and even clunkier foreshadowing (the line, “as a father, you become so scared of your children getting scarred that you become what scars them” hits like the damp, muffled thuds Blake will soon hear in the halls of the rickety old house).

But when Blake receives word that his father has been officially declared dead after 30 years of searching, he sees it as an opportunity for a fresh start. The family heads to Blake’s childhood home to pack up his dad’s things and help mend Blake and Charlotte’s deteriorating marriage (with this reviewer wondering why the 30-year time jump didn’t go straight here). When they arrive under the light of a full moon, the family is attacked by the “face of the wolf,” but manage to escape to the farmhouse where they barricade themselves for a long night in. However, they did not escape without a scratch as the creature clawed Blake and he begins to undergo a slow, horrifying transformation. Blake may be protecting his wife and daughter from the monster at their door, but he has put them in grave danger of the monster he is about to become.

In his introduction before the screening, Whannell stated that his interpretation of the werewolf legend was born out of COVID. Whannell and his wife Corbett Tuck co-wrote the first drafts of the script in lockdown while raising two young children and with a close friend of theirs suffering a serious debilitating illness that eventually took their life. The result, as Whanell put it, was he and his wife, “pouring all of their anxieties of that time into the script,” and that unsettling sense of inescapable dread is potent throughout Wolf Man. The skin-crawling ways Whannell taps into these fears separate Wolf Man from other werewolf tales. By presenting lycanthropy as an illness rather than a curse, emphasized by Blake’s slow, gradual, and gnarly transformation from man to beast.

With a group of people trapped in an isolated, claustrophobic location that must survive with a monster hiding among them, it is no surprise Whannell has cited John Carpenter’s The Thing as an inspiration for the film. But the cutthroat tension of Wolf Man stems not from the mystery of who is or who will become the monster, but rather when the monster will lose the last shred of humanity. It struggles at points to maintain the consistent level of urgency needed for a high-tension, survive-the-night horror film , but when it does maintain that level of visceral fear-driven terror, it is some of the best pure genre work Whannell has done. It’s complimented perfectly with Stefan Duscio’s cinematography which, much like another recent reimagining of a classic Universal Monster with Jarin Blaschke’s work on Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, really pushes the limits in its use of darkness on screen without completely obscuring or flattening the image.

Unfortunately, where Whannell truly excelled in his take on The Invisible Man is strangely where Wolf Man has its shortcomings. Whannell has thrown too many balls in the air with what he wants to explore with Wolf Man, such as illness, parenthood, repressed male aggression, and cycles of abuse — and he can only catch so many. To the point where the film loses focus on what it wants to say by the time the credits roll. This sort of overreach becomes especially apparent when information about what this Wolf Man really is turns out to be frustratingly predictable. The film makes no attempt to make you suspect otherwise, but still treats the moment as this earth-shattering revelation that turns the whole film on its head.

In the end, though, Wolf Man may not reach the heights of Leigh Whannell’s previous revisionist outing into the world of the Universal Monsters, but it certainly delivers as an eerie, atmospheric chamber horror about one’s humanity slowly crumbling away. The whole may be less than the sum of its parts, but Whannell’s vision for these classic characters in the modern world remains an endlessly fascinating one that I hope he gets more opportunities to further explore and reinvent more of these classic characters in the years to come.

Follow MovieBabble on Twitter @MovieBabble_ and Follow Sean @seanhub_

Thank you for reading! What are your thoughts on Wolf Man? Comment down below!

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to MovieBabble via email to stay up to date on the latest content.

Join MovieBabble on Patreon so that new content will always be possible.