Wolf Man bites.
Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man arrives to film fans panting with excitement, thanks to his successful revival of The Invisible Man, but unfortunately it ends up a tedious, toothless trip to the deep woods of Oregon, lacking the raw energy or depth to make an impact.
When Blake (Christopher Abbott) receives news that his estranged father has finally been declared dead, he returns to his childhood home in rural Oregon with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) in tow to clear out the property. But when the journey is interrupted by an encounter with a mysterious creature, the family find themselves fighting for survival as Blake slowly undergoes a horrific transformation.
Slow to start, Whannell’s Wolf Man never really recovers from its sedentary preamble before it takes a thirty-year time jump to the present day. There’s an effort to ground the lycanthropic legend in indigenous mythology and cryptid folklore but it’s delivered in such a leaden and clumsily obvious way that it essentially telegraphs the entire movie you’re about to watch. Christopher Abbott delivers a decent performance as Blake, especially in committing to the sheer unpleasantness of the grisly and gradual lycanthropification but make-up effects and physicality aside, the character has the depth of a puddle left on the kitchen floor by a yet-to-be-housetrained pupper.
Still, he’s miles better than Julia Garner who seems mostly to be catatonic throughout the film. Her aesthetic seems to be 1987 “Causing A Commotion”-era Madonna, and her performance is so wooden and flat that Madge is likely blushing from this most sincere form of flattery. With both parents having the emotional range of kibble, poor Matilda Firth is left to try and salvage the family dynamic and while she outshines both her adult co-stars, there’s little she can do to bring together a family unit that has zero chemistry and which the script actively works against them ever interacting as convincing human beings.
Whannell’s direction, usually so assured, falters here. Sound design is playfully malevolent but the cinematography sabotages the potential scares. Every twist, or turn, or fright is telegraphed by the shot set-up and with a story so uninspired and straightforward, there’s no visual flair to disguise the narrative paucity. Even the Oregon setting, with its potential for rich, moody atmosphere, feels wasted as little more than a generic copse of trees. In an era where horror is dominating the box office and finding ways to push boundaries and grasp through allegory some contemporary topics which other genres are hesitant to tackle Wolf Man feels declawed, defanged, and utterly neutered.
