Since I was a kid I loved everything about The Wolf Man including Lon Chaney’s phenomenal performance. The idea of a human being transforming into a feral beast set my imagination ablaze especially a tortured soul like Larry Talbot who transforms and even kills against his will. He is my favourite Universal monster, bar none.
I will never forget the old gypsy’s words in George Waggner’s 1941 classic:
“Even a man who is pure at heart/And says his prayers by night/May become a wolf when the wolf-bane blooms/And the moon is full and bright”.
The fact that I enjoyed Leigh Whannell’s take on The Invisible Man (2020) had me intrigued to see what he would do with another Universal monster. This rendition of another man’s agonizing plight is interesting but not compelling.
Wolf Man is one big chase scene. As soon as out of work writer Blake (Christopher Abbott) brings his family (Ozark’s Julia Garner as Charlotte and Matilda Firth as the young Ginger) to his estranged father’s backwoods home to settle the estate the hunt is on and although there are brief pauses it never really ends or relents until the final predictable frame. Think the pacing of The Evil Dead and you’ve hit the mark. This is the best thing about Wolf Man, the pacing.
Predictable is unfortunately the prevailing theme here. It is interesting in that we see the world through Wolf Man’s eyes at various times through the movie. It is interesting in that Blake very, very slowly transforms into the rabid creature before the terrified eyes of his family. Other than that, there is nothing shocking or surprising including the true identity of the werewolf who infected Blake upon his family’s arrival in Mirkwood, Black Hills, Fangorn, Lothlórien…or whatever that place is.
Abbott, who doesn’t have many feature films under his belt, navigates the spectrum of doting, protective father to a cruelly infected and ultimately disfigured man well especially when Blake loses the power to even talk to or understand his loved ones as he become more and more feral. At times, our heart goes out to him. At times, we wish someone like Sir John Talbot would mercifully club him with a silver-headed cane to put Blake and his family out of their misery.
You have to wonder if Matilda Firth’s ‘Ginger’ is a nod to the amazing Canadian werewolf film Ginger Snaps but whatever the case Firth often steals scene after scene and is the presence that keeps the film grounded in some sort of emotional ‘reality’. Although Garner is one of the best actors around she is absolutely miscast here. We don’t really buy her as a disengaged, disconnected mom. Garner herself seems to just be going through the motions until her character has to step up to the plate to save her fracturing and threatened family.
With Jack Pierce influential and ground-breaking work in the original Wolf Man and Rick Baker setting a new modern, award-winning benchmark in An American Werewolf in London, the transformation scenes are always the calling cards of any werewolf movie. The one scene in Wolf Man and the final result are so unsatisfying as you’ve seen better and bolder scenes before like in The Howling. Bones crack as they elongate, nails pop to replaced by claws but there is no real grand transformation. Blake just becomes a hairy man with teeth, claws. It is all very underwhelming. About the only scene that pushes the envelope is when Blake is so overpowered with blood lust that he gnaws on his own diseased, bloody arm instead of his wife.
Wolf Man is not as adventurous nor as fascinating as his The Invisible Man. Sure, that has a lot to do with Wolf Man not having an Elisabeth Moss like tour de force performance but just how the events transpire in such an uninspired way cursed this project from the very start. The script needed a boost, that missing creative spark that is sorely lacking, that silver bullet fix.
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