I love a good werewolf movie. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one. That’s not to say it’s a bad film – it’s just not a good lycanthropic flick.
A family at a remote farmhouse is attacked by an unseen animal, but as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.
From the outset, I want to say that I genuinely admire the approach that writer/director LEIGH WHANNELL has taken with his reboots of classic monsters. In those heady, pre-pandemic days, his version of THE INVISIBLE MAN was just about the last film I saw at the cinema before everything shut down. I enjoyed it immensely, and appreciated the faux-scientific grounding he used to justify the film’s central conceit. It’s such a great way to bring the themes of these films up to date for modern audiences, and it’s a direction he’s taken again with WOLF MAN. I’ll steer away from spoilers, but I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that WOLF MAN has more of DAVID CRONENBERG‘s THE FLY in its mutated DNA, than it does JOHN LANDIS‘s AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON or NEIL MARSHALL‘s DOG SOLDIERS.
JULIA GARNER is excellent as ever as Charlotte – a city-dwelling reporter who’s more at home in the newsroom than she is in her apartment with husband Blake (CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT) and young daughter Ginger (MATILDA FIRTH). The focus of the tricycle-like dynamic is the disconnection between Charlotte and the other two, but the loose wheel is Blake – a character that’s either underwritten or underperformed, I can’t decide which. I just felt that Blake’s character – pivotal to the story on every level – has neither the presence nor the depth to carry the film.
Mild spoiler ahead – the twist with this retelling of the werewolf legend is that it takes more of a viral approach to lycanthropy. It’s not a curse and there’s no bloodline (as such), no silver bullets, no full moons. When Blake is infected (for want of a better word), it’s a surprisingly casual moment in a particularly chaotic scene. He then undergoes a long and gradual transformation which is far removed from the classic transformation scenes of AMERICAN WEREWOLF and JOE DANTE‘s THE HOWLING. The resultant creature too bears little resemblance to the vicious monsters we’re used to.
All in all, the film feels flat and clumsy, both rushed and lethargic at the same time. There are a lot of less than subtle clues dropped at key moments throughout, which make it oddly predictable in places. For a film that takes such an original approach to a well-worn genre, it all feels disappointingly familiar. I think all this would be okay if you gave a shit about the family or were at least invested in their story to some degree. I wasn’t. There are flashes of brilliance – most notably when the film shifts in and out of ‘werewolf mode’ (you’ll know what I mean when you see it) – but they’re lost amongst the pedestrian plot. The final scenes are again reminiscent of THE FLY, but carry none of that film’s emotional weight.
Reluctantly, I’m adding WOLF MAN to my list of not recommended films, but I’m not entirely comfortable doing that. It’s a decent, well made horror film. But it’s definitely not a good werewolf movie.