The Movie Guru: ‘Wolf Man’ misses the chance to be truly terrifying
Universal/Courtesy photo
Horror can carry a lot of metaphors, but it needs to be the right metaphor.
In 2020’s “Invisible Man,” Leigh Whannell reinvigorated a classic movie monster by tying it into the concept of abusive relationships and being stalked. It gave the old monster a new face, one that presses primal buttons and reinvigorated it for the modern world. There are deeper things going on, but all of them are scary.
In “Wolf Man,” Whannel has once again tried to find the monster in the metaphor. Unfortunately, werewolves have carried a variety of metaphors in popular media for years now, making it hard to find a fresh spin on the idea. Whannel tries, using both degenerative illness and the sometimes traumatic legacy of fatherhood, but using them both divides the energy he could be devoting to either. There are a lot of interesting ideas, but none of them are focused enough to hit the same primal buttons “Invisible Man” did.
Which is sad, because there was a lot of potential to dig into both. Christopher Abbott plays a man who has a complicated relationship with an aggressive, angry father who disappears when he’s young. When he grows up, caught in the middle of a struggling marriage and wrestling with his own anger issues as a father, he decides to take his family back to his childhood home. He immediately gets bitten by a strange wolf-like creature, leaving him and his family to have to deal with the transformation.
The movie does a good job showing how unsettling the physical changes of the transformation are for Abbott’s character, but the movie doesn’t previously establish fears about losing control of your body. Audience members are able to draw the connection to degenerative illness, but the movie never does. In “Invisible Man,” on the other hand, the unhealthy relationship between the two leads was established well before invisibility became a factor.
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The metaphor that the movie really should have leaned into more, however, is turning into your own emotionally unhealthy parent. Without giving you too many spoilers the movie is perfectly set up for it, and some of the movie’s most powerful moments are Abbott trying desperately to hold onto his humanity for the sake of his daughter. Unfortunately, the movie is never direct enough about the connection for the horror to be as visceral as it needs to be. It relies on the audience to put the pieces together, but it should be making it an inescapably haunting idea.
Without that, we’re left with a well-meaning movie that has some interesting moments but never quite manages to come together. The practical effects and sound design chronicling Abbott’s transformation are great, but Abbott’s marriage gets short shrift. His wife, played by Julia Garner, is a vital perspective on the horror of what’s going on. Sadly, the movie never bothers getting inside her head, missing out on a huge opportunity for more powerful scares.
After all, the biggest scares are the ones coming from inside your head.
Grade: Two stars
Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com.
