The curse of lycanthropy is a metaphor for domestic abuse as a mother and daughter attempt to confront what has become of daddy in Wolf Man, now playing in Prague cinemas. After 2020’s excellent The Invisible Man, director Leigh Whannell attempts to inject new life into a classic Universal monster by re-inventing it through a modern lens; but while the attempt is admirable and there’s a lot to like here, this one ultimately misses the target.
Wolf Man opens with an effective 15-minute flashback as father Grady (Sam Jaeger) and young son Blake (Zac Chandler) go hunting deer in the Pacific Northwest. A mysterious animal presence interrupts their hunt, and the pair take refuge in a nearby deer blind—but as the unseen monster stalks them, Grady aggressively berates his son for wandering off, and we wonder what, exactly, the true threat here might be.
This opening showcases Wolf Man at its best: gorgeous cinematography (with Queenstown, New Zealand playing locations in rural Oregon), impactful underlying themes (the father is nearly as threatening as the presumed lycanthropic threat), and memorable horror staging, as the werewolf’s breath menacingly rises from beyond the walls of the blind. It’s such a well-crafted sequence that Whannell will wisely re-use it for the finale.
The bulk of Wolf Man takes place over a single evening decades later, as the now-adult Blake (Christopher Abbott) and his family—wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth)—move back to Blake’s childhood home following the death of his father. In an early scene, Blake snaps at Ginger when she ignores him on the street; this sets up the film’s core themes, which should be hammered home in later scenes when he turns into a werewolf and tries to eat her alive.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before the family even makes it to the rural Oregon cabin, they’re attacked by a lone werewolf, who ingeniously places himself in the middle of traffic in the hopes that the driver will swerve off the road, crash into the ravine below, and serve him up a truckload of fresh meat. The trio manage to get away and barricade themselves in the cabin, but not before Blake is scratched by the wolf and fated to turn into a monster himself.
Forget classic interpretations of this story, which involve full moons, silver bullets, and transformations that might represent drug or alcohol binges—the nights we into unrecognizable creatures, only to turn back into ourselves the following day. Almost every werewolf movie, including the recent Werewolves, plays by this rulebook, but Wolf Man wants to de-mythologize the genre. Here, the wolf’s curse is near-instant, like in a zombie movie: once we go bad, there’s no turning back.
Pity poor Blake: we experience first-hand his transformation, which is nicely stylized as the camera spins around and enters Predator-, or rather, Wolfen-vision. He can no longer understand his family, who seem to be speaking in tongues from his perspective, and his own attempts at communication don’t get through. He grows a bit of the usual fur, claws, and canines, but the werewolf design here, which doesn’t even live up to the original 1941 film, leaves a lot to be desired.
At its core, Wolf Man is a metaphor for domestic abuse, but the message gets lost along the way: by making Blake such a sympathetic character, we don’t identify with his wife and daughter. We should be watching Charlotte and Ginger fight for their lives as their patriarch has been revealed as the monster he always was; instead, we watch Blake waste away on the couch, unable to protect them from another, external, threat.
In the end, Wolf Man struggles to fully realize its ambitious themes, leaving a muddled impression of what it wants to say. Whannell reaffirms his credentials as a horror director, and there’s a lot more going on here than the typical Blumhouse January release (compare to last year’s Night Swim), but this one falls well short of the peak he reached with The Invisible Man. Wolf Man has bite, but it doesn’t quite leave a lasting mark.
