Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
Screenplay: Leigh Whannell, Corbett Tuck
Running Length: 1:43
MPAA Classification: R (Violence, Language)
U.S Release Date: 1-17-25 (Wide)
Genre: Horror
If there’s one overused theme in horror movies today, it’s generational trauma. We've encountered it in films like Hereditary, Smile, Pearl, Men, Never Let Go, and countless others over the last several years. While a few of those films effectively explored their themes of trauma, most end up being unsatisfying because they forget one important thing: to actually be scary. Sadly, add Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man to the growing list.
Things get off to a promising start, opening with a tense prologue set in the mountains of Washington thirty years in the past. The movie then skips to the present day when we meet Blake (Christopher Abbot), his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Although he and his daughter share a strong bond, things aren’t going so well with his marriage. After learning that his father has recently passed away and left his estate to him, he convinces his family to take a trip to the house that once caused him pain and grief to clean it out and potentially fix his relationship with Charlotte. In the midst of their travels, however, they’re attacked by a mysterious creature, and while trying to escape, Blake is injured. The rest of the film follows his slow deterioration and transformation while they barricade themselves in his childhood home from the beast that lurks outside.
The decision to make Blake’s transformation gradual instead of it happening suddenly is one of the few things Whannell does right. The way we see Blake become The Wolf Man is disturbing, and thanks to relying on practical effects rather than CGI, it is far more convincing than what we got back in the terrible 2010 remake. Where the film fails, however, is in making him truly terrifying. That’s because Whannell clearly has more on his mind than just making a straight-up horror film. He uses The Wolf Man as a metaphor for the trauma we sometimes pass down to our children, and while that's fine, it makes the creature far less imposing than he should be. Maybe if it was more subtle instead of being so obvious, it could have worked, but it doesn't.
Where he's a little more successful is in developing the bond between Blake and Ginger. That's mostly thanks to the performances of Abbot and Firth, but because their characters are so thinly drawn, it didn't resonate with me as forcefully as I would have liked. Garner also deserves mention, but just like Blake and Ginger, her character is also underdeveloped. What's even stranger is that as the film progresses, her fractured relationships with both her husband and daughter that seemed important in the beginning eventually become afterthoughts, making the ending less impactful.
As someone who was a huge fan of Whannell's The Invisible Man, I had high hopes going into Wolf Man. Considering how well he updated the story of The Invisible Man to modern times while also doing a fantastic job of incorporating themes of domestic and psychological abuse, it's somewhat shocking the way he fumbles here. This isn't a bad film, and I appreciate the attempt to try and do something different, but the lack of scares and poorly developed characters make this more of a missed opportunity than something worth recommending.
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