2025 | rated R | starring Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott | directed by Leigh Whannell | 1h 43m | 2 out of 5 stars |
After the collapse of Universal’s planned Dark Universe, a network of remakes centered around classic 1930s monster movies, writer/director Leigh Whannell (Saw) was handed The Invisible Man by Blumhouse. On a modest budget and with a powerful lead performance from Elizabeth Moss, he reinvented The Invisible Man into a modern tale of domestic violence terror and crafted an intensive, ferocious remake that stands with one of the best in recent memory. I gave the movie 5 stars when it debuted in early 2020 just under the wire of the Covid-19 pandemic. The prospect of turning over The Wolf Man to Whannell would seem like a no brainer immediately made for one of my most anticipated movies of the new year. I was not prepared for it to misfire the way it does.
After his father passes, Blake (Christopher Abbott) decides to move his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) into their childhood farmhouse. On the way the Uhaul is attacked by a mysterious creature and Blake is bitten. As the night goes on, he starts to change into a monster that threatens his family.
Wolf Man feels like a movie that dies under a thousand tiny mistakes. Each decision, what it emphasizes in the story and doesn’t, each set-up and payoff don’t feel in tune with what the movie is going for – and ultimately what the movie is going for even gets lost in the haze. So, it starts out with a 10-minute prologue of young Blake hunting with his father. A sequence that goes on too long, tells us nothing and leads nowhere. Then we are introduced to Blake and Charlotte’s marriage, strained by stress, as he gave up his job to raise Ginger and she continues to work as a journalist. Nothing about Blake becoming the Wolf Man backs into their marital story the way that the Invisible Man becomes a perfect vehicle for PTSD paranoia. The movie doesn’t even try to say that Blake was being domesticated or feminized and the Wolf Man let’s him get back in touch with his animal side or something – that’s easy metaphor # 1.
Instead, Whannell turns Wolf Man into Chronenberg’s remake of The Fly. We follow Blake slowly transform in a metaphor for illness and aging. I would bet almost anything that this movie shifted in story, “inspired” by Covid lockdowns and started the movie down a path of themes it had no interest in exploring. Everything is off kilter here. The pacing is slow, the lighting is too dark, the wolf makeup is particularly cheap, and we never see it in its full form. There are any number of ways that you could have updated a Wolf Man movie for 2024, too many to speculate here, but I do know that the second you cast Julia Garner I would have re-focused this movie into white-knuckled Ruth Langmore vs The Wolf Man story where Garner is given more agency and attitude. Instead, none of the characters are particularly strong and because Whannell made the call to put their marriage on the rocks, we and Charlotte feel nothing when she has to watch her husband succumb to illness. If you’re going to rip the couple apart at the end, the proper set-up is that you start with them happily married. Instead, Garner is called on to stare blankly at a man she barely cares about turn into a monster without any character to play or emotion to draw on.
Because the film is isolated in a farmhouse, set pieces are slim. The opening car crash is the film’s highlight and it’s not all that exciting. The rest of the film fumbles around in a single location so dark it’s hard to see, milking the sound effects around us. Whannell’s Wolf Vision sequences are kind of cool, giving us an idea of how tortured Blake is by hyper-hearing when he hears the loud thumps of a spider crawling up the wall. But we’ve seen all this before. In An American Werewolf in London, An American Werewolf in Paris. In The Fly. In Ginger Snaps for god’s sake. In the 2010 Joe Johnston remake The Wolfman.
Actually, this might make a good time to revisit The Wolfman. Initially dismissed as another poorly CGI’ed remake, Johnston’s movie with Benicio Del Toro as the Wolf Man, Anthony Hopkins as his father (true to the original movie) and Emily Blunt as his wife, has a galloping pace, a visual style, a fun Victorian setting and some terrific cartoonish gore. It’s one of those cult “who is this for?” movies that goes all-out in a schlocky entertaining B-movie way that works. At least, works more than Whannell playing it so safe with his Wolf Man the movie is afraid to say anything at all.