“Wolf Man” is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.
Leigh Whannell, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Corbett Tuck, is into straight-faced psychological trauma over spook-show theatrics. He previously directed 2020’s “The Invisible Man” which cleverly swapped protagonists and reworked H.G. Wells’ novel into a modern-day chiller about stalking and domestic abuse.
This is a weaker attempt to crossbreed the classic Universal monsters with contemporary anxieties: a post-pandemic lockdown lament about the impossibility of protecting children from fear. This Wolf Man, Blake (Christopher Abbott), is a très 2020s “gentle parent,” a fully domesticated girl dad who laments, “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you become so scared of your kids getting scarred that you become the thing that scars them.”
Thirty years ago, Blake was himself a scared kid. Young Blake (Zac Chandler) grew up in rural Oregon with a survivalist dad, Grady (Sam Jaeger), an intimidating, psychologically wounded ex-soldier who screams, “Do you want to get hurt?!” in his son’s face as though offering to simplify things and kill the boy himself.
Blake escaped to Manhattan as soon as he could and tried to be a kindler, gentler father to his daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), even though that city too has its share of scary figures howling on the sidewalk. He’s comfortable goofing around in red lipstick to make her giggle and even tries his best not to swear around her: “Shivers!”
Now, Blake has returned to his childhood farm with Ginger and his emotionally distant wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and immediately catches a case of flesh-eating rabies. The promise of the title plays out exactly as expected, only gnarlier and draggier with Abbott, a serious talent, cursed with having little to do besides writhe and howl and channel as much empathy as possible through his eyes. Werewolf films tap into the audience’s fear of losing control; here, we dread that Blake is inheriting his dad’s temper, although it’s unclear how much the character is aware of the pending irony.
I’m empathetic to the film’s general pitch. The modern world is beset by boogeymen: pandemics, gun violence, floods, fires. Nightmares are real, and parents struggle to protect and soothe their kids. (Blake fails at it so disastrously that it plays out like a morbid joke.) But the movie is half of an idea and an awful lot of heavy breathing. It’s hollower than a tweet asking for thoughts and prayers.
Whannell sniffs around the perimeter of a culture war subtext. Gauging by the skull flag prominently displayed in Grady’s basement, the boonies of the Pacific Northwest are populated solely by unsocialized, militia-affiliated wild men. “Darling, everyone around here has a gun,” Blake tuts to his wife, just before one of those gun-toting Oregonians (Benedict Hardie) learns that Charlotte is a big-city journalist and shoots her a suspicious sneer.
This urban-rural divide has been done to death but having alluded to it, it’s doubly frustrating that the script hasn’t decided which side Blake is on. We know his dad trained him to hunt and forage, but that hard-earned instruction never factors into the film — not even a close-up of poisonous mushrooms that reeks of foreshadowing. We also know that young Blake saw and escaped a Wolf Man, and that the phenomenon is so known in these parts that the locals have given it two names: Hills Fever and the indigenous term “the face of the wolf.” Still, adult Blake reacts like he’s never heard of such a thing. Did he black out his trauma? Did he simply forget?
Similarly, the line between wolf and man is so blurry that it doesn’t hold our interest. This lumbering, limb-losing, eyebrow-less creature with its oddly amphibious bullfrog rattle feels so vaguely conceived, you start to wonder whether Whannell is making some galaxy-brained point that werewolves are the origin story of zombies and Bigfoot.
Are these monsters pure animal or can they work a doorknob? It seems like an awfully bad idea when the family cranks on a noisy generator in a hushed forest — like dumping chum into the water for Jaws — but if it makes a difference, we can’t tell. Closing doors seems to work for a while. Later, when the film feels desperate to do something, the beast magically learns how to sneak inside and creep around in the darkness, a cheap jump scare it does twice in row.
There’s no talk of full moons and silver bullets. There’s not even one shot of the moon that I can remember, and our first werewolf sighting takes place after dawn. Instead, you get the sense that werewolfism is a switch that gets flipped on once — or maybe twice to make up for any audience confusion. When Blake gets initially mauled, the swirling cinematography is so hard to understand that, for good measure, a few beats later he gets mauled again.
What seems of most interest to Whannell is transformation as a physiological process. If werewolves might mutate only once, he and the makeup and special-effects teams make it as painful as possible: loose teeth, shedding hair, roiling knuckles, flimsy fingernails. It’s godawful and honestly pretty good, especially when Blake grabs his jaw and gives it a miserable yank. We’re never sure what he’s thinking, but the film has fun putting us inside Blake’s literal POV with Werewolf-O-Vision, a digital effect that makes the trees shimmer and the capillaries in Ginger’s cheeks look as tasty as red licorice. In one nifty gag, his new super-hearing makes a rustling spider as noisy as Riverdance’s Michael Flatley.
Oddly, only Garner’s Charlotte seems to have any instinct for firearms, first aid and auto repair. Half the Manhattanites I know can’t drive, but this hero can swap out a car battery without looking up instructions on YouTube. Beyond that, the character doesn’t have much life in her. Functionally, she’s just prey, an appetizing nothingburger who, like the script, is little more than a string of illogical decisions.
Garner won three Emmys as a ferocious heroin dealer in “Ozark” and can shift down to do great low-key work in modern horror dramas like “The Assistant” and “The Royal Hotel,” in which the way she seems to sleepwalk toward danger is a powerful comment on clinging to normalcy in times of strife.
Here, she’s also been directed to play it stiff: When Blake says he’s worried of dying, she barely blinks. The couple starts the film talking like strangers, so it’s no loss when they lose the ability to communicate at all. At least Blake gets more of a reaction when he pees on the floor. Bad dog!
