With three prior botched attempts at relaunching their own Universal Classic Monsters Universe with the 2004 flop Van Helsing, 2014’s Dracula Untold, and the disastrous 2017 Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy, Universal decided to step back and go with a smaller scale approach with the 2020 thriller The Invisible Man. Directed by Saw and Insidious writer Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man was a substantial hit when it opened just weeks before the pandemic shut the world down. Taking the classic character as a means to explore gaslighting and a metaphor for a toxic relationship, the film had memorable shocks, but it was the rich story at the center that struck at the heart of audiences. The last stab at the Wolf Man property was the ill-fated 2010 remake starring Benicio del Toro. While that film was a costly project, plagued by a revolving door of directors and reshoots, it was still a properly lavish and gothic horror film with Oscar-winning make-up effects from the iconic Rick Baker. Whannell’s new take on the material is closer to his Invisible Man in terms of its small scale and focus on minimalism, but this new film is ultimately minimalist to a fault.

Courtesy Universal Pictures
Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a loving father to Ginger (Matilda Firth) and husband to Charlotte (Julia Garner). His wife is busy as an overworked journalist while Blake is a struggling writer who primarily stays home to take care of their young daughter. Being away at work has taken a toll on Blake and Charlotte’s marriage; even Charlotte’s relationship with her daughter has grown distant. Blake has just gotten the official death certificate for his survivalist father who disappeared into the Oregon woods some years back. With their lives in a bit of disarray, Blake decides to take his family on a trip to his childhood home in Oregon to clear out his father’s belongings and do some much-needed family bonding time. However, on the way there, the family gets into a nasty car accident after hitting something, or someone, on the road. With their moving truck smashed between two trees, Blake is attacked and bitten by something in the woods that appears on two legs, but looks like an animal. Blake’s condition worsens by the minute, so Charlotte and Ginger haul the injured Blake into his father’s abandoned home where something outside is still hunting them. Unfortunately, Blake is also beginning to transform into something unnatural, similar to the figure that attacked him.
Director Leigh Whannell’s brilliant and subversive The Invisible Man took a more abstract, metaphorical approach to its classic character. The genre titan behind Saw, Insidious and Upgrade takes a more traditional, yet minimalist approach to his depiction of the Wolf Man. However, unlike his previous film, there is no interesting allegory here whereas the original 1941 film was so rich in subtext. Whannell has given audiences such great, unique genre films, but the biggest sin here is just how uninteresting this all is. Whannell’s script, alongside his co-writer and wife Corbett Tuck, rarely feels like it engages with the many themes it initially lays out. The few new ideas Whannell brings to the screen are commendable, but don’t overcompensate for the film’s fatal flaws.
A neat idea that gets some mileage is seeing events from Blake’s POV specifically during his slow transformation and his continuing inability to communicate to his family. It’s an interesting new device to show the other side of a werewolf transformation and Whannell makes this an effective storytelling device to show the disintegration of Blake’s mental state. While it is admirable for Whannell to lean towards a minimalist approach to his story, Wolf Man lacks scares or much escalating tension. Whannell opts for slow burning dread, but a lack of intensity renders much of the film rather dull and sluggish. The filmmaker will use his trademark fluid camera work for one or two nifty sequences, largely towards the beginning and during the central attack scene, but this is much sleepier film than expected for such a kinetic director. At least the Del Toro film was interesting and had a handful of memorable moments.
Courtesy Universal Pictures
The new creature design is also a bit of a head-scratcher. Again, the filmmaker’s attempts at making this different from the tried-and-true Wolf Man formula is admirable, but this new character design, which is one of the only werewolves who seemingly loses hair as he transforms, just isn’t very scary and looks closer to a wendigo monster than a Wolf Man. There are other gaps here as well that seem ill-advised. For as much as Whannell leans into the folk lore element of the story, the audience never gets a grasp of what the rules are for this incarnation. Just how long does the transformation process take? How many of these Wolf Men are there? Can they transform back into a human or are they stuck like this forever? And seemingly most unforgivable, where is the moon? This is a remake of The Wolf Man and not a single shot of the moonlight is to be found.
With such a strong hook for his first classic monster, there isn’t much of a strong new stance on the material which makes you wonder why Whannell wanted to make this film in the first place. At its core, this is yet another modern horror film about generational trauma. A film that, in case the audience wasn’t paying attention, will broadly spell out its themes with no ambiguity. This is the kind of film that will obviously hint at something, only to then act like the thing it was hinting towards is some big twist that theatergoers wouldn’t see coming, despite the clear writing on the wall. Whannell wants to keep the focus of the film on the family at the heart of it, but despite game performance from Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, these characters are painted in broad strokes. For folks expecting to see a fun, gnarly creature feature, they’ll be disappointed to find the tone is much closer to Michael Haneke’s Amour than any previous incarnation of The Wolf Man.

Courtesy Universal Pictures
Wolf Man is a disappointing endeavor from director/co-writer Leigh Whannell. While the filmmaker brings a few new ideas to the table, the ingredients never fully come together and he doesn’t take an interesting stance on the concept. This is a curiously half-baked horror film that fails to elicit many thrills or memorable scares. Woof!
Wolf Man is now playing in theaters.
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