‘Wolf Man’ Will Leave Audiences Howling with Boredom

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a clever riff on a horror classic, paying reverential homage to its source material while simultaneously updating it with germane modern subtext. Thus, it was reasonable to assume that his second take on an iconic Universal monster would be a similarly faithful and shrewd beast. Wolf Man (January 17, in theaters), alas, is a feeble sort of creature feature, jam-packed with transformative grisliness yet woefully short on invention or depth. It isn’t a debacle, but it also won’t have genre aficionados howling for more.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a writer-turned-homemaker who spends his days and nights caring for beloved daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). If infatuated with his offspring, whom he’s dedicated to protecting, Blake is less enthusiastic about his journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), and as their post-workday bickering suggests, the feeling is mutual. While Charlotte is seemingly jealous of her husband’s close bond with their kid, Blake’s displeasure with his spouse is left unexplained. Still, despite their differences, both admit during an impromptu lunch date that they want to make things work. To facilitate this, Blake proposes a getaway to the forested Oregon farm where he was raised—a remote piece of property he’s just inherited in the wake of his father’s death.

In an extended prologue, Wolf Man details young Blake’s (Zac Chandler) strained relationship with his dad Grady (Ben Prendergast), whose obsession with his son’s security is scarily intense and the source of grown-up Blake’s parental protectiveness. As implied by his basement stronghold’s skull-centric military banner, his matching tattoo, and his fondness for guns, Grady is a reclusive ex-military kook, and during a hunting expedition with his boy, he gets to put his skills to use when the two encounter a menacing creature. Though this meeting results in no actual violence, it rattles Grady. Upon returning home, he tells his buddy (via his trusty CB radio) that he finally spotted the mysterious hiker who—as opening text indicated—went missing in 1995 and was rumored to have caught an airborne disease that turned him into what the indigenous population calls “Face of the Wolf.”

No matter the traumatic nature of this incident, adult Blake has zero reservations about revisiting his birthplace, and he’s equally unperturbed when his journey along a woodland path is stymied by an unexpected gate and the appearance of old acquaintance Derrick (Benedict Hardie). Agreeing to take them to their destination, Derrick hops a ride in the family’s rental truck and immediately starts acting creepy. Nonetheless, he’s not the individual Blake and company have to fear; that would be the figure who materializes out of nowhere in the middle of the road, causing the vehicle to go careening down an embankment. Everyone survives this crash but not the subsequent attack by the enigmatic fiend, which claws Blake’s arm (uh-oh!) before Blake can spirit Charlotte and Ginger to his old house.

Whannell stages this early confrontation with brisk muscularity and one impressively vertiginous camera rotation around the suspended-in-mid-air rental truck, and once Blake gets Ginger and Charlotte behind a locked door (and barred windows), the director begins dramatizing the man’s infected condition with woozy titling cinematography. Whannell’s stewardship remains sharp throughout, as when he segues between Charlotte’s normal POV and Blake’s blacklight-esque animalistic perspective, in which humans’ eyes glow and their words sound like hollow gibberish. Formally speaking, Wolf Man is crafty and efficient, immersing one in its protagonist’s mutating head space, marked by heightened smell and—as evidenced by Blake’s discovery that loud thumping footsteps are being made by a tiny spider—hearing.

The film’s story, however, is another matter. Whannell and Corbett Tuck’s script spells out its central dynamics in such leaden fashion that it telegraphs much of the climax. Worse, it doesn’t have anything to say about disease, paternalism, marriage, or, well, anything else. Delivering rip-roaring thrills is hardly a shameful priority, but considering his previous directorial outing’s layered narrative, it’s disappointing to find this affair so shallow. It’s also rarely frightening, its many suspenseful sequences playing familiar games with silence and clamor, light and dark, including more than one shot in which Blake—having evolved into a hungry, clawed force of nature—lurks unnoticed (by Charlotte and Ginger, if not the audience) in the shadows.

Blake’s werewolf-y makeover involves losing his teeth, fingernails, and hair, leaving him a semi-balding freak with terrible skin and even grosser fangs. Crafted by make-up artist Arjen Tuiten, Abbott’s lycanthropic form isn’t terrible so much as underwhelming, and that additionally goes for the older monster that wants him and his brood dead. In light of Blake’s prior talk about keeping Ginger safe, it’s easy to see the two brutes’ confrontation coming from a mile away, and when it arrives, it proves to be routinely feral. Eager to bring things full circle, Wolf Man spends its latter passages finding a way to return to the deer stand where adolescent Blake and his pops originally faced off against the beast. The effort, unfortunately, isn’t worth it, since the film’s sole idea is to wrap things up in the squishiest manner imaginable.

With two decades of experience writing and helming successful horror ventures (Saw, Insidious, Upgrade), Whannell is no stranger to this type of terrain, which is why it’s such a letdown that he eventually plays things so cautiously. Primarily set over the course of a single night and in a secluded cabin à la Night of the Living Dead, Wolf Man flirts with claustrophobic anxiety, only to repeatedly let the air out of the proceedings by resorting to conventional set-ups and pay-offs. Embodying characters that boast a single straightforward trait, Abbott and Garner come across as wooden and unsure of themselves, and their MIA chemistry more or less neuters the action’s stakes. It’s difficult to worry too much about anyone involved when they’re barely people to begin with, and their fates are painfully to predict.

Wolf Man’s finest attribute, ultimately, is that it’s a self-contained tale rather than a piece of some ill-fated interconnected movie universe, as was Universal’s initial idea before Tom Cruise’s The Mummy torpedoed those plans. However, commending the film for having a definitive ending (and, thus, no obvious sequel potential) is, admittedly, merely damning it with faint praise.