In 2020, Blumhouse reworked Universal’s Invisible Man into a visually arresting, harrowing metaphor for intimate partner violence and stalking. In the spirit of exploitation cinema that’s the studio’s hallmark, they figured they’d try the same trick with Universal’s Wolf Man. It’s not a terrible idea on paper, and the cast turns in decent performances. But neither the script nor director Leigh Warnell are willing to go for the jugular, and the result is a remarkably uninvolving film.
The pieces are in place for a tale of generational violence and trauma. San Francisco writer Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) learns that his estranged, borderline abusive, and vanished father Grady (Sam Jaeger) is finally declared dead in Oregon. He travels back to the family cabin to clear out dad’s effects, and asks his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), an overworked journalist, to come with him to work on their strained marriage and reconnect with their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth).
When they get to the forest, though, they’re attacked by a mysterious creature, which infects Blake. The sensitive, loving dad turns into a speechless ravening beast, and Charlotte and Ginger have to escape not one, but two monsters—the one outside and the one in the family. The domestic violence metaphor works well in a werewolf story, and it has a long pedigree in horror. Yet, it never connects.
The first problem is that—unlike, say, Jack in The Shining, or even the unfaithful goodtime dad in 28 Years Later—Blake pre-wolf is so nice, empathetic and caring that the werewolfing feels entirely imposed by the plot, rather than something that claws its way out of the internal dynamics of the family itself. Blake’s dad, Grady, in the brief glimpses we have of him, has a temper and an abusive streak—but Blake has determined, successfully, never to be like his father. We see him exhibit one brief, mild flash of temper when Ginger almost topples over into the street after ignoring his warnings, and he has one low-key argument with Charlotte. But these hardly count as warning signs. The movie wants to be about the way that charming, apparently empathetic men can be manipulative and violent, but it’s too invested in its perfect nuclear family, and its loving caring patriarch, to tear through the attractive surface and expose the ugly viscera.
The film’s unwillingness to entertain the idea that Blake might really be the bad guy leaves the movie wandering around like a beast shot full of tranquilizers, uncertain where the prey is or whether it should bother going after it. In Invisible Man, the movie’s terrifying because you’re there with Elizabeth Moss as she scrambles to escape from an all-powerful, all-seeing, patriarchal monster who’s obsessed with her and inescapable. In Wolf Man, the film starts out with you in Blake’s corner, and only reluctantly situates you with Charlotte as the disease overtakes her husband. The lack of identification with Charlotte, and the sense that Blake isn’t, and can’t, really be dangerous, robs the second half of the film of virtually all of its tension and drama.
The special effects are also lackluster; the nods to the transformations in Cronenberg’s The Fly and An American Werewolf in London mostly serve to underline how much less effective the gore is in the film you’re watching. Abbott’s supposed to have prepared by watching animal videos to make the wolf man’s movements realistic, but much of his performance is shot in low lighting, so that effort is largely wasted. There are some nice shots of the woods, which aren’t what anyone has come to the theater for. A horror movie in which you don’t really fear the monster and don’t feel invested in the fate of the victim isn’t much of a horror movie, and a werewolf film without teeth is pointless.