Well, sometimes a metaphor doesn’t work.
When The Invisible Man (2020) dropped, it was a better-than-expected reimagining of a familiar concept. Even if it had some pitfalls in story. That film’s director, Leigh Whannell, is back here, and unfortunately, many of those gaps in execution have widened in his 2nd retelling of the Universal Monsters, Wolf Man. Much like it’s previously mentioned kin, Wolf Man takes the approach of updating its premise through the lens of modern gender politics, this flavor being a cautionary tale about aggressive masculine energy taken too far. Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) is presented to us as a troubled man, still shaken by his rigid upbringing, the fault of a terminally paranoid, rageful, and demanding father. Blake does not want to repeat the mistakes of his dad, yet still can’t help to lose his temper and lash out at his young daughter (Matilda Firth), an action also primarily motivated by paranoia.
After receiving the news of his father’s sudden passing, Blake is filled with regret, and ops to take his family on a trip to his childhood home, a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps to reminiscence on the good times when his dad yelled at him for being too lackadaisical in the woods. But, predictably, the family’s “fun trip” is about to turn into a fight for survival against one of nature’s most monstrous anomalies. In turn, Blake’s return to his toxic environment ensures he will take on those destructive traits.
Upon surface level inspection, you see the logic in Whannell’s story structure. The fabled transformation into a wolf, always a metaphor for the other/unknown or dark id of the human psyche, is utilized here to represent a deformity in masculinity, pushed too far into the direction of feral anger. But The Wolf Man is too much of a by-the-numbers B-movie to honor its attempts at deeper storytelling. The characters do not have enough depth, not enough is explored about them to make them unique beyond the familiar archetypes they embody.
This issue begins early, as the senior Lovell (Sam Jaeger) is very over-the-top in his fearful macho man shtick. We understand that the character is written and performed this way to convey a lot of information quickly, but this results in the performance not having a lot of nuance, which harms the setup as these early moments are the impetus for Blake’s traumatic childhood. So when Blake comes of age, his character flaws are also 2-Dimensional, the film relying too heavily on the trope of tortured dad still dealing with the effects of his childhood, but the subject itself is not adequately explored. This is mirrored in the other key conflict in the story, as Blake believes his workaholic wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) lacks connection with their daughter Ginger. The opportunity here is to explore the connection between these two dissimilar, but both troubling, forms of parenting, and the differing effects they have on children. But Wolf Man just isn’t that introspective about its own story threads.
Early on, our first glimpses at the film’s spooky ingredients are tense moments, but the production begins to falter once the action really picks up. This is where this movie differs from The Invisible Man, the latter got by heavily on a bevy of fun and unnerving set pieces. Wolf Man, in contrast, doesn’t have the special effects or exciting moments to match. There are still some cool on-screen wizardry in the transformation scenes, although we’ve seen better in the genre, but the film is mostly unimpressive visually, enveloped by a darkness that isn’t flattering to the actors or the action. If this is the alternative, I’d rather have moments with better lighting that showcase the production values in greater detail, even if said lighting breaks some of the immersion. We’ll give you a pass, we already know you’re on a film set, so just make the most of the tools available.
The film’s unremarkable visual style, combined with heavy themes that wallow in generic framing, makes Wolf Man an unmemorable experience, particularly in the 2nd half as it limps to a finish line. Its final moments and story decisions echoing what we’ve seen many times before, a test of how tough our docile protagonists are, before we get a peek at nature’s “better tomorrow.” It makes the story feel like a shallow retread, in contrast to the first half’s attempts to get us to take the material seriously through channeling the energy of contemporary gender ideas.
If The Invisible Man was a solid, if uneven, chiller, Wolf Man is mostly unrealized potential. Whether there were issues in production, or if the movie would simply benefit from a re-write by a more adept hand, the story stews in the broth of an everlasting conflict between nature and nurture. The film’s parents are reacting to a beastial world that often threatens humanity, yet their mistakes lead them to have more in common with the very threats they are attempting to shield their children from. There’s plenty of tragic poetry in that, but Wolf Man’s execution isn’t poetic enough for us to feel its weight. These issues are deep and psychological, too complex to be solved with a shotgun blast.
