After the apparent failure of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy in 2017, the plug was pulled on the Dark Universe reboot plans from Universal’s Monster movies. But then…Blumhouse’s partnership with Universal brought in writer/director Leigh Whannell to reimagine The Invisible Man in 2019. Which was awesome. So awesome that Blumhouse/Universal gave Whannell a crack at Wolf Man.
Wolf Man is about a man named Blake (Christopher Abbott from Kraven the Hunter) whose father was obsessed with a legendary creature that stalked the woods near their cabin when Blake was a boy. When his father passes away, Blake brings his wife, Charlotte (Ozark’s Julia Garner), and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth from Hullraisers), with him to pack up the cabin and put the estate in order. On the way there, the family learns that the creature is not just a legend when they are attacked. They make it to the cabin, but Blake has been bitten, leading Charlotte and Ginger to wonder if the same beast that’s outside the cabin may be inside it with them as well.
The screenplay for Wolf Man was written by Leigh Whannell along with his wife, actress Corbett Tuck. What Whannell and Tuck do with Wolf Man is similar to what Whannell did for The Invisible Man – they take the horror story and steer it in a more emotionally driven direction. While Wolf Man isn’t quite as effective at doing that as was The Invisible Man, it does humanize the villain a bit more, which always was one of the more underappreciated aspects of the tentpole Universal Monster movies. Of course, the original The Invisible Man was the exception, as he was as evil as they come, so there was no way to humanize him. But The Wolfman was as much of a victim as his victims, and this movie leans into that thesis.
Wolf Man is another in a long line of movies that takes a classic horror tale and reimagines it in a modern way. There’s a definite (albeit shallow) mythology behind the beast’s existence, making it almost a campfire tale or urban legend that winds up being true. Even though Blake grew up in the woods, he and his family are the outsiders, so the mystery is revealed slowly through their experiences, whether because Blake himself doesn’t know the folklore of the area or because he has refused to believe in it after being a city boy for so long. Either way, the audience is the winner, because they get to put the pieces of the legend together along with the characters.
Despite its compact running time and brisk pace, the characters in Wolf Man are fairly well-developed. The anchor of the film is Garner’s Charlotte, but the real emotional pull comes from the relationship between Blake and his daughter. This is the bond that humanizes Blake. He’s still a monster, but he’s one that still loves his family and one that his family still loves, and that makes all the difference. The viewer cares about these characters, even when they’re growing hair and growling at each other.
Family drama aside, Wolf Man is a horror movie, and Whannell goes retro with his monster by employing the use of practical creature effects (designed by Arjen Tuiten, who also did the creatures for the new Ghostbusters movies). This gives his Wolfman a fun, eighties-style vibe. The look and feel of the monster is very much like that of another classic monster movie reboot, David Cronenberg’s The Fly. The Wolfman in Wolf Man bleeds, drools, drips, oozes, and slimes in all the right ways. The movie is more suspenseful than scary, but the monster itself is worth the price of admission.
The way Whannell handles the wolf transformation is just as fun. It’s a slow process, and Whannell flips between the point of view of the family and that of the creature, which adds a fresh take on the whole becoming-a-werewolf motif. It’s not just a physical transformation, it’s mental as well, and the wolf-to-be goes through more changes than just growing hair. Whannell’s take on this is fascinating in a “why didn’t someone show us this sooner” kind of way.
Wolf Man is no The Invisible Man, but it’s not a typical January dump movie, either. It still proves that Leigh Whannell’s name should be in the same conversations about the New Face of Horror that are currently dominated by guys like Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, Mike Flanagan, and Ari Aster. If Wolf Man is one of Whannell’s more average movies, then the horror world should welcome him doing any and all new Universal Monster reboots.
GRADE: B-
MPAA Rating: R for grisly images, bloody violent content, and some language
Release Date: January 17, 2025
Running Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
The post ‘Wolf Man’ Review: Leigh Whannell’s Hair-Raising Spin on a Horror Classic appeared first on ShowbizJunkies.
0 Comments