If you’ve been following the saga of Universal/Blumhouse’s Wolf Man for the last few months, you may have been struggling to avoid making any judgements before seeing the film. I know I have, mainly thanks to the creature reveal at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights this past fall. It’s safe to say that the first look was underwhelming for many of us.
Last week, another suspect decision was made by the film’s PR honchos, who decided to release the transformation of Christopher Abbot’s Blake into the titular character. We posted the video, but I didn’t watch it. It seemed like it would be a key moment in a film that had already lost some shock value, one I preferred to experience in context rather than out.
Suffice to say, I was going into Wolf Man with a fair amount of ambivalence. Happily, though it’s far from perfect, I wound up enjoying much of director Leigh Whannell’s new take on the iconic horror legend.
From Blumhouse and visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell, the creators of the chilling modern monster tale The Invisible Man, comes a terrifying new lupine nightmare: Wolf Man.
Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth; Hullraisers, Coma). But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.
In many ways, Wolf Man is a siege film, but the perpetrator mainly comes from inside the family. The dynamic between a devoted father and mother struggling with their relationship while also working to protect their child is relatable; the outside forces banging at their door, in this case, are both metaphorical and literal. As Blake, Christopher Abbott does a solid job of finding the line between the past that haunts him and the present, which he needs to rise above. When he eventually descends into wolfhood, I felt sympathy for the character. Unfortunately, Abbott’s partner in the film, Julia Garner, felt woefully miscast, almost fatally for me. I never bought into her as either mother, wife, or final girl in Wolf Man.
However, I did buy into the sense of isolation the family was placed in: a lonely farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, the sights and sounds of the forest surrounding them, and the ensuing sense of dread. That all worked for me, as did the actual look of the various wolf men themselves; yes, there are two, and that’s not a spoiler if you’ve seen any trailer. The creature is a far cry from the classic Lon Chaney Wolf Man or Benicio del Toro’s 2010 version, but seeing it in action on screen, from the first signs of Blake’s disease to his eventual full morph, this Wolf Man worked for me. Of course, your mileage may vary.
While I did feel the movie was a little long (and it’s not that long, to begin with), and even with my feelings on Julia Garner’s role and some suspect moments in the script, with its reasonably strong story, creature design and some solid jump scares, I wound up liking Wolf Man more than I thought I would. Sometimes, that’s more than enough. to howl about
