Wolf Man Review

There’s quite a bit of expectation surrounding Wolf Man, not only because it’s about the classic Universal monster, but also the track record of Leigh Whannell after he remade The Invisible Man in 2020 to great success. His remake recontextualised the Universal Monster into a scorned ex-husband tech genius who fakes his death and continues to stalk his wife played by Elisabeth Moss, turning the jump scares and tension-laden set pieces into not just affecting subtext but an affronting reality extrapolated into a horror movie along the lines of Polanski’s Repulsion. So beyond the name, one may wonder what Whannell has to say with his remake and what reality he can grab from the ever-so-heightened concept.

The film follows a couple comprised of two hapless New York writers; Blake (Christopher Abbott) is currently in-between jobs and refers to his main profession being a dad as he takes care of their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) while Charlotte (Julia Garner) is an often busy journalist and breadwinner of the household. Blake and Charlotte seem to butt heads inadvertently as they see each other, is the power imbalance at play in their careers? Or as parents? Have they stopped loving each other? The family heads out to rural Oregon to retrace Blake’s past in his childhood home but also as a summer trip away from the city as the family is attacked and Blake falls ill when they reach their destination, they realise their plans may have been thrown amiss.

Most of Wolf Man’s action is restricted the one location over one even. Blake’s rural childhood home is enough to creep an audience in its isolative design away from civilisation and into the unknowns of nature. Whatever technology exists here from rifles, old pickup trucks, and radios is of varying functionality and quality but truly what this concept does is bring us closer to these characters and this family unit while Blake transforms into something unrecognisable.

Christopher Abbott stuns as Blake, not just as a domestic presence but as he transforms into this wolf-like entity. His words begin to slur, his mobility becomes less human, his ability to understand human words slowly becomes lost and eventually, he deters into animalistic intentions but Abbot’s performance keeps humanity at the front even in his most harsh moments. With Julia Garner’s Charlotte being forced to step up to protect her daughter and her husband from himself, the relationship of the family unit is what keeps the wheels of the horror genre spinning even with the influence of an outside presence.

A valid comparison would be to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, even if Wolf Man doesn’t go to that level of grotesque it grounds its uncanny bodily transformation in human relations as Cronenberg did, where the body horror is obviously not nice to watch but even more impactful as we’re put in the perspective of the loved ones of who see these protagonists slowly lose control. Where Whannell’s The Invisible Man felt more external in its threats, Wolf Man plays with the internal with its sound design that intentionally confuses in the source of sound coming from within or outside, the psychological turns of the story putting drama and conflict first but also what the concept explores in its metaphor as Blake is forced to confront his childhood and specifically his father (Sam Jaeger) in the way he treats his family. Blake’s link to his father contains the origin of what’s going on in the larger plot but also in the characterisation of the family.

Despite the subtext, Whannell happily doesn’t let metaphor stop him from embracing genre with themes adding weight to the film’s various set pieces, with a stand-out being an encounter over a plastic sheeted greenhouse where the wolf entity rips and claws through the material from the bottom as the family fear for the lives on top. The film never forgets what it is as a studio horror film based on a classic monster, although the framework can be transparent as character dialogue can read as thinly veiled exposition and the movie seems to want to get to the main plot quicker than we can settle with these characters as more than ideas. There’s a part of me that can see a more weirder, gross, and affecting film here but Wolf Man succeeds in being entertaining, thrilling, and dealing with its pathos in a simple but communicative fashion that I can anticipate will speak quite well to audiences.