The secret to making a great wolf man movie — and you gotta pinky swear not to tell anybody about this, because it’s a secret — is that the “wolf man” part is optional. Werewolf stories aren’t about transforming into half-human/half-canine hybrids as much as they’re about people wrestling with their darkest impulses. Being attacked by a monster isn’t the scary part, it’s the idea that you’re living with a monster inside of you, and are always one mistake away from destroying your life and hurting the people you love. If you can afford great makeup effects and you want to put a werewolf in there, knock yourself out. But you can tell the same type of story without buying a ton of latex and fake hair. You just gotta call it something like “Red Dragon” or “Dexter” or “The Stepfather” instead.
Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man” takes this idea to heart, dropping most of the mythology that sprang up around the title monster — no full moon, no silver, iffy about the magical curse — and going all in on the psychological torment. The monster doesn’t even look like a wolf in any traditional sense, which is easy to complain about but, to be fair, Lon Chaney Jr. looked a lot more like an angry fuzzy man than “White Fang” walking around on two legs. Whannell’s version doesn’t look anywhere near as iconic as that classic Universal rendition, or for that matter as convincing, but his film compensates with a frightening focus on a father trying not to scar his child, literally and figuratively.
“Wolf Man” stars Christopher Abbott (“Poor Things”) as Blake, who was raised by an overbearing, survivalist father in the wooded mountains of Oregon. Thirty years later, he’s now living in the city, working as a writer, and trying not to pass his emotional baggage down to his daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth, “Subservience”). When Blake finds out his dad, long missing, has been declared legally dead, he convinces his increasingly distant wife Charlotte (Julia Garner, “Ozark”) to take a break from work and reconnect with her family, by finally seeing where he grew up.
Before long, by which I mean to say they literally don’t even get as far as Blake’s old house, they’re attacked in the forest by a wolf man. They flee to his dad’s property and barricade the doors, but now they’ve got a bigger problem. There’s a wolf man outside that wants to kill them, and also Blake has been infected too. He’s turning into an inhuman creature right before his family’s eyes. Will he be able to resist this horrible affliction long enough to protect his wife and daughter, or will he succumb and transform into their worst nightmare?
On the surface Whannell’s “Wolf Man” is a somewhat generic monster movie. It’s about innocent people who get attacked by a killer creature in a house in the middle of the woods. No molds have been broken plot-wise. The ingenuity Whannell brought to his instant classic remake of “The Invisible Man,” which reimagined the premise as a metaphor for an abusive relationship and invented all kinds of terrifying new visual gags, isn’t on the menu today. “Wolf Man” is about going back to basics, for better and worse.
So although the frights are reasonably frightful, albeit often familiar, what the movie really hinges on is Christopher Abbott’s performance. He’s tortured before the monster even infects him, and his fittingly hangdog performance makes his de-evolution particularly tragic. Even when Blake loses the ability to speak we can see the anguish and love in his face, and one gets the distinct impression that Whannell’s interpretation of a “wolf man” may not demonize wolves as much as the earlier renditions. It’s possible, for a while at least, that Blake isn’t turning into a mindless killing machine. Instead he’s simply turning into a wild dog, dangerous and unpredictable, but maybe he could be tamed.
That Blake’s “will he or won’t he” inner torment continues while he’s a monster, instead of using his metamorphosis as an excuse to let his worst nature go wild, gives Whannell’s “Wolf Man” real pathos. And although the connections to Curt Siodmak’s original 1941 “The Wolf Man” are exceedingly thin, Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck wisely adhere to that film’s emotional core: The man who doesn’t want to become a monster, fueled by an unhealthy relationship with an overbearing father who might, in one way or another, ultimately be the death of him.
But while there’s a lot to appreciate about the new “Wolf Man,” the film’s flaws are hard to ignore. Charlotte isn’t as complex a character as Blake. She has her own parental and romantic failings but we never learn why and frankly, thank god she admitted it out loud, because the movie doesn’t dramatize that very clearly. Julia Garner is a brilliant performer but either her character was never fleshed out or most of the flesh was dropped on the cutting room floor. The movie gradually shifts focus to Charlotte for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t have the same weight as when Blake was center stage. We just don’t understand her as well.
The other problem with “Wolf Man” is that even though this movie didn’t need to have an old-fashioned werewolf in it, and even though there’s nothing wrong with going in a different direction with the monster makeup, the makeup they settled on struggles to terrify. It’s not even consistently convincing. A decision seems to have been made to make Blake less hairy or canine than most movie werewolves, which allows more of the actor’s impressive performance to shine through, but the tradeoff is that he often just looks like Christopher Abbott under a lot of latex. A lot less would have been more, and a lot more would have been more too (by definition, if nothing else), but this halfsies approach to the title creature isn’t likely to replace the Chaney version as anyone’s go-to favorite movie werewolf. Or replace most of the others, for that matter.
So it’s not an instant classic like “The Invisible Man.” I think we can all live with that. It’s still a scary and interesting movie about a wolf man, anchored by a haunting performance from Abbott, who understood the assignment and went for extra credit. Leigh Whannell knows what makes werewolves tick, if not necessarily what makes them awesome to look at, and “Wolf Man” is (mostly) better for it.
“Wolf Man” opens exclusively in theaters on Friday, Jan. 17.