That humans are infinitely more evil than any fantastical threat the human imagination can conjure up isn’t a particularly novel idea, but it’s one that Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell has explored before to startlingly novel effect. With his 2020 sci-fi horror film, The Invisible Manwhich followed a woman (Elisabeth Moss) stalked and harassed by her sadistic husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), he located a potent metaphor in how the signs of abuse itself are often invisible, hard to notice in even the people closest to us until it’s too late.
Whanell brings a similarly sensitive approach to the creature feature Wolf Manwhich, like his previous film, is also a reboot of a classic Universal Monster movie. It also features a woman trapped in a situation with an unstable man, also kicks off with the settling of an estate following a death and also ends with a shot of a woman leaving a house and walking out into freedom, though this one elicits a vastly different emotional reaction.
This time around, Whannell ties his reboot of the 1941 gothic horror film Wolf Man to the emotional anchor of parental protectiveness, and much like a man undergoing the painful transformation into a werewolf, it too is warped and twisted into monstrous proportions. “There is nothing here worth dying for,” reads a No Trespassing sign early on in the film, a nifty bit of foreshadowing. Anyone who’s ever had a child would disagree.
Revisiting past demons
Wolf Man opens in the lush Oregon woods, as beautiful as they are dangerous, as the authoritarian hunter Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger) keeps drilling into his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) with military precision. Whannell, who also helped launch the Saw and Insidious franchises, is adept at tapping into primal fears — like the pervasive horror of never being able to escape an abusive partner in The Invisible Man.
Also read: Paatal Lok Season 2 review: Jaideep Ahlawat burns bright in a murky mystery
He also does so skilfully in this early sequence, capturing the stomach-dropping dread of someone turning away for two seconds only to look back and discover that their child is missing. When Brady finds Blake once more, he also finds that they’re not alone, that split-second terror of the hunter becoming the hunted so all-consuming that Blake then spends the next 30 years attempting to outrun it, and the man it turned his father into.
The adult Blake (Christopher Abbott), now a city slicker, has shed his father’s alpha-male masculinity for something softer; the film’s first visual of him is that of him as a Girl Dad, sweetly clutching his daughter’s giant pink teddy-bear. Later, he allows her to apply lipstick to him as a father-daughter bonding moment. He’s even trying to swear less, for her. It eventually becomes clear that Blake is unemployed, though his profession as a writer calls to mind a visual of a man at a desk typing away at his laptop, a far cry from his father’s tough wilderness explorer cred.
Having closed himself off from Grady all these years, it’s the news of his father’s death that finally causes him to open up with the force of a burst dam as he’s hit with waves of unexpected grief. He, his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), return to his childhood home to put things in order, unaware that they’re also revisiting past demons.
Lacklustre theme development
The rest of the film is set over one seemingly endless night as Blake, having been bitten by a werewolf along the way, begins transforming into one. The immersive sound design puts viewers into his head; ordinary noises that wouldn’t otherwise even register to people are amplified to overwhelming levels for an animal. And through the eyes of a werewolf, everything adopts an infrared glow. Blake loses his teeth, hair, and at one point, gnaws at an infected arm wound, making his physical transformation a viscerally unnerving experience.
Also read: Black Warrant review: Vikramaditya Motwane helms a compelling prison drama
Not every emotional beat, however, lands — the idea of Blake and Charlotte working together through this ordeal and potentially emerging stronger isn’t convincing because we aren’t made privy to what weakened their marriage in the first place. Or even that it’s all that weak. Does he resent her for being the sole breadwinner? Does she resent him for taking to parenting much more naturally? Their newfound partnership feels unearned. Only a scene in which she tells him she loves him is devastating, because it turns out he’s too far into his animal transformation to understand any of it.
Still, Blake makes for a much more pitiable figure than his counterpart in the 1941 film, The Wolf Man, who displayed predatory instincts long before he turned into a man-eating creature. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) spies on a woman through a telescope and repeatedly refuses to take no for an answer when asking her out, traits that undercut the tragedy of his ending. Whannell steers clear of anything that could make Blake too unlikeable, while also sidestepping any of the previous film’s lore. There are no silver bullets or wolfsbane or pentagrams here, as they were in The Wolf Man. There’s not even a single shot of the full moon.
Whannell is excellent at staging a scare — there’s a superb one that hinges on what kind of view a dusty windshield being wiped after years might reveal — but his more pared-down approach focuses the story on fraught family dynamics. It’s less about breaking supernatural curses than breaking generational ones, and to that end, the film’s big twist is a gut-punch. Blake’s transformation takes place in fits and starts, instead of all in one go like in other werewolf movies, drawing out the agonising loss of a family watching their loved one morph into someone unrecognisable. Even so, superior to The Wolf Man and yet lacklustre in the development of its themes compared to Whannell’s own The Invisible Man, this film has moments in which it sings, and yet falls short of being a full-throated howl.
Comments are closed.