wolf man review

Wolf Man has no balls — it’s cabin-fever body horror of the most generic variety

2 stars out of 5

Of all the classic Universal monsters, the Wolf Man stands as perhaps the purest cinematic creation. Sure, the Mummy was also ostensibly created for the silver screen, but its reign as a monster pales in comparison to the Wolf Man for the purest of reasons: it’s just a stupid mummy. Movies have had a major hand in shaping the werewolf myth to the point where it has pretty safely moved away from its inception in George Waggner’s 1941 The Wolf Man, in which a middle-aged Welsh man is bitten by a wolf in the moors and spends the rest of the movie series begging for sweet release. Werewolves on film have now taken on a distinctly metaphoric flavour, with its most popular metaphor being puberty (Ginger Snaps, Wes Craven’s ill-fated Cursed). Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is, like his previous film The Invisible Man, a very loose retelling of the 1940s original… but unlike that film, it doesn’t really seem interested in standing in for or saying anything at all.

wolf man review
Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott and Matilda Firth in Wolf Man

Whannell’s Invisible Man starred Elisabeth Moss as a woman whose abusive husband, having suddenly taken his own life, appears to reappear as a ghost or invisible ectoplasm of some kind to stalk her as she tries to move on with her life. Whannell presented a robust — if not exactly subtle — metaphor for abusive relationships in the form of slick, vaguely James Cameron-ian sci-fi horror. One would assume that Whannell’s approach to Wolf Man, which shares essentially no DNA with its ostensible source material besides its lead eventually exhibiting furry, lupine characteristics, would similarly try to weave modern problems into a timeless story. Instead, this bizarrely truncated boilerplate horror movie is concerned with a very familiar problem: it’s not-so-secretly about trauma.

Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) is a New York City writer with a harried journalist wife (Julia Garner) and vaguely precocious pre-teen daughter (Matilda Firth). Between jobs and faced with a bruised marriage, Blake discovers that his late father (Sam Jaeger) has officially been declared dead after having gone missing for several years. He, Charlotte and little Ginger decide to relocate to the Oregon cabin he has inherited despite his long-buried resentments of his father imposing an alpha-dog, rough-and-tumble lifestyle on him as a child. The second they even close in on the rustic mountain farm, however, the family is attacked by a mysterious creature roaming the woods that wounds Blake, eventually causing him to start slowly and painfully transforming into the titular lupine fella. 

wolf man review christopher abbott

With such a limited cast and what amounts to a single location, Wolf Man takes the form of cabin-fever body horror of the most generic variety. Things go bump in the night; Garner and Frith scream while a CGI-augmented Abbott roars and hollers and smashes shit around the cabin. There are some squirm-inducing setpieces in the middle of the film as Blake’s new form rips through his human flesh, but with so little potential for chaos spread across only three cast members, one assumes that the deepest terror should be psychological. The film’s opening scene features Blake as a boy (played by a child actor who looks so much like Abbott that, in a surprising twist on kidcasting tropes, it becomes rather unsettling) being verbally abused by his ill-defined father. This should be, by any stretch of the imagination, the psychological bedrock of the film, and yet it seems underbaked and pointless in the scope of the film.

One could perhaps applaud the film for avoiding any and all clichés of the werewolf movie: no silver bullets, no full moons, no puberty… but what does that leave us? Abbott made up to look like a grotesque wax figure of Ray Liotta as he snarls around, half wolf man and half rotting zombified humanoid. In its best moments, I had a begrudging respect for the film’s attempts at creating genuinely unpleasant moments, but they float unmoored in a movie that spends its entire running time on the verge of becoming something.

wolf man review christopher abbott

Unfortunately, Wolf Man’s January release date and abortive runtime (though it’s listed as being 103 minutes everywhere online, it clocked in at least 20 minutes less when I saw it) strongly suggest this is a tinkered-through dump job. Whatever its flaws are, they’re the result of a film that seems to have been fine-tuned to bring maximum adrenaline at the expense of just about anything else. We’re meant to care deeply about these characters because they’re the only characters we meet — but everything we ever see them do is generic and truncated and meaningless, rapidly chucked out of the way to get to the gory bits faster. 

I can’t really theorize what Whannell actually had in mind for this project, but given the fact that he’s a director who has put some amount of thought into his work in the past, I find it hard to believe that his pitch for this project was simply “the guy turns into a wolf.” Wolf Man is put together with a decent amount of care and thought, but there’s nothing of substance linking any of it together. It’s as generic and as witless as any major horror release of the last 10 years, with little to set it apart from any number of streaming shelf-fillers. Whose fault that is we’ll probably find out eventually, but as it stands, there’s not much to it. ■

Wolf Man (directed by Leigh Whannell)

Wolf Man opens in Montreal theatres Friday, Jan. 17.


For our latest in film and TV, please visit the Film & TV section.