If you have claws and an insatiable craving for human flesh, can you still be a great dad? That’s the theme underpinning Leigh Whannell’s latest go at dragging a Universal Monster into the cold light of the 2020s, a more hard-bitten and demanding age than the one Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man prowled – and a lot harder to scare.
Obviously, the answer is ‘no’ – werewolves fall down in so many key parenting categories – but the Aussie horror auteur behind Saw and 2020’s terrific The Invisible Man deserves some credit for bringing a new prism to the furry critter first made famous by Chaney in 1941.
Christopher Abbott, often excellent in supporting roles, steps up in a lead role once earmarked for Ryan Gosling. He’s Blake, a country kid who’s grown up to appreciate his big-city life with workaholic journalist wife Charlotte (Ozark’s Julia Garner) and moppet of a daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). A writer who’s ‘between jobs’ and worried about his marriage, Blake pours himself into parenting, inadvertently mirroring the overprotective tendencies of his own dad – set up in flashback, along with the movie’s wolfman mythology, via a great prelude sequence.
There are one or two genuinely disgusting moments of body horror here
Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck’s screenplay helpfully twice-underlines the impending twist – ‘Sometimes as a daddy, you get so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them,’ Blake tells Ginger – before the trio head for his old family farm in the wilds of Oregon and the horror begins in earnest. Blake’s long-missing dad (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Sam Jaeger) has finally been declared dead amid the dank forests of Oregon (filmed in NZ), so the family travel to his farmstead to pack up, refresh and reconnect.
Of course, there’s a furry beastie with other ideas and Blake’s encounter with it spreads its curse to his veins. The second half of Wolf Man (there’s no ‘The’ here for obvious reasons) cleaves fairly close to the icky transformative mode of The Fly, with impressive prosthetics and one or two genuinely disgusting moments of body horror.
That it falls a way short of matching The Fly’s pathos and electricity isn’t Abbott’s fault. The Poor Things actor does his best work beneath the increasingly gross make-up. But Whannell seems torn between pursuing frights in the darkness – the film plays out in claustrophobic semi-real time over one night – and leaning into the deep sadness of a family man becoming the thing he most feared.
And the frights aren’t scary enough to justify going in the former direction – the wolfman is a suitably feral beast with ultra-violent tendencies, but it has major problems with doors – and Garner and Firth are mostly left screaming and waving knives around to minimal effect.
Maybe the glitch is in the casting. With an A-lister like Gosling playing against his usual on-screen persona to go from good-natured family man to savage lycanthrope, Wolf Man would be a much more disorientating, subversive beast. As it is, it’s an atmospheric, sporadically disquieting depiction of fatherhood in freefall.
In cinemas worldwide Jan 17.