Universal Pictures, Blumhouse, and filmmaker Leigh Whannell are two-for-two with their Universal Monsters re-imaginings with Wolf Man, their follow-up to 2020’s The Invisible Man. Don’t worry though, it’s not building into an interconnected movie franchise à la the Dark Universe (for that you’ll have to go to the theme parks).
With Wolf Man, the werewolf lore you thought you knew is remixed and transformed in a harrowing horror picture about facing the generational trauma of modern toxic masculinity. Girl-dad Blake (Poor Things’ Christopher Abbott) is a nurturing stay-at-home parent who aims to break the cycle of tough love he was raised on and still haunts him. He gets a reminder of his militaristic secluded upbringing when he receives the keys to his father’s rural home in Oregon, where he grew up hunting and avoiding talking about the shared pain of losing his mother.
That sadness is alluded to in the opening when they encounter a creature in the woods—a creature his father wants to prove the existence of with his fellow hunters. Blake couldn’t wait to get away from his father’s quest, but the events of Wolf Man make that impossible.
© Universal PicturesBeyond its monstrous elements, Wolf Man smartly presents a very relatable reality for many parents living in an unpredictable and harsh economic environment. Blake’s an unemployed parent who actively doesn’t want to repeat the past but can still feel the pressure of societal expectations for who should be the head of a family. Blake’s wife Charlotte (Ozark‘s Julia Garner) is the breadwinner, a high-profile journalist forced to spend less time with her family; she holds some resentment toward Blake who she feels is closer to their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth).
This is all set up quickly, almost too quickly, to get to the action. In particular, it felt that a lot of Charlotte’s character and feelings were trimmed down to the point of making her a little too cold toward Blake, undercutting Garner’s performance and making some final act motivations feel abrupt.
© Universal PicturesIn a move to save his family, Blake brings his wife and daughter to his childhood home to pack it up after his father is presumed dead. They don’t even get to the house before they see the mysterious creature appear in the road and it’s chillingly breakneck as they hide from the monster chasing them. Blake and his family realize he’s been scratched—and as he faces the failures of his father coming to a head, he’s plunged into his own inner struggle, which manifests itself in the virus that begins to turn him into the threat his family needs to be protected from.
Abbott has been a long underrated actor and his dramatic emotional performance makes Blake’s terrifying transformation deeply tragic through the course of the film. When you see it occur on screen, his physicality is heartbreaking as he fights the toxic wolf creature virus. The way Abbott embodies his Wolf Man evokes the character’s Universal Monsters legacy, with homages to Lon Chaney’s facial emotiveness in his modern take.
© Universal PicturesEven though his movie never says Blake’s a werewolf (there’s no full moon rules or other common fairytale lore), Whannell masterfully captures what an animalistic alpha-man virus could look like if it manifested, with nods to shots in other films that explore the themes of sins of the father. (In particular, an “over the woods, car on the road” shot echoes the opening to The Shining—and there’s no better way to let the viewer know this is not going to go well.) Wolf Man‘s approach feels very timely in an era where an older generation clings onto outdated concepts of manhood and the current generation grapples with identity in a crumbling society that forces them to face their fears of failure. Will they succumb to the monsters of the past or break free?
Wolf Man opens in theaters this Friday.
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