Wolf Man review: Does the job, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking

Now Whannell’s back, trying to work that same hoodoo on another Universal monster – the Wolf Man.

Once more, he’s reimagined the fundamental idea in a significant way, but it’s not like he forcefully modernized an old concept for 2020. In essence, it seems reminiscent of the ’80s, and that’s not just due to Julia Garner, the movie’s leading actress, having an ’80s-inspired hairstyle similar to what was seen on a Desperately Seeking Susan poster.

As a cinema enthusiast, I’d rephrase it like this: In the rugged mountains of Oregon, my formative years were spent learning the art of hunting under the stern tutelage of my father. However, one fateful day, we nearly fell prey to a mysterious beast that my dad believed was a missing hiker. Locals whispered tales about him contracting a strange virus, transforming him into the legend known as the Wolf Man.

Thirty years on, Blake (Christopher Abbott) resides in the city as a writer, sharing his life with his journalist wife Charlotte (Garner), and their young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). It’s revealed that Charlotte frets over whether her demanding profession has made her an inadequate mother, while Blake is the one who engages in parent-child activities (these scenes are meant to be endearing, but they come off as slightly sickening instead).

Later on, Blake, who had been away from his father for a long time, discovers that his father has passed away, leaving him the ancestral farm. Consequently, Blake proposes a visit to the old farm for some quality family connection.

Unusually, it doesn’t happen literally as one might expect. This could be the initial werewolf movie where the character sheds fur during transformation, which is just one of the significant deviations from the conventional werewolf tropes.

In essence, much like David Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” Whannell has crafted a movie centered around metamorphosis, though without revealing specific plot details that could be considered spoilers.

This film delves deeply into the realm of disturbing body transformations, offering some genuinely squirm-worthy scenes for enthusiasts of this specific sub-genre. It also features numerous well-executed jumpscares and several exceptionally unsettling instances of tension, notably a shot that transitions from a human’s view of a scene to the wolf man’s perspective of the same scene.

From a practical standpoint, the Wolf Man film can be considered fairly good in terms of horror movie production, but its consistently dim color scheme, which leans heavily on various tones of melancholy, starts to feel like an exaggeration or mockery of itself over time.

Following The Invisible Man, it’s rather underwhelming. Tying the themes of parenthood to the transformation feels half-hearted, the characters lack depth and become grating at times, and the narrative loses momentum approximately halfway through, following a significant “disclosure” that many viewers would have anticipated ahead of time.

The movie aims to transform Charlotte into a contemporary, fierce scream queen, but it’s challenging to hide that she often falls into the stereotypical damsel-in-distress role. This is further aggravated by the fact that Garner predominantly portrays a single, slightly exasperated expression throughout the film for about 95% of its duration.

And following the concept of lycanthropy being a virus, similar to Covid, the story fails to develop or progress in any meaningful way with this idea.

Essentially, this movie is about a story set in a forest cabin where the main conflict involves a werewolf villain. In terms of delivering on that theme, it succeeds. However, don’t anticipate any revolutionary elements from it.