Wolf Man

Five years after his thematically interesting and thoroughly gripping adaptation of the story of The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell returns to Universal Studios’ pool of classic monsters, only to find that someone’s clogged up the plughole with hair again.

Huge establishing shots encompass mountainous swathes of Oregon, isolating the characters before they even appear in a lonely house surrounded by forests in which anything might be hiding and probably is, and oppressed by a great grey sky filled with rainwater and foreboding. Only the odd little nimbus of yellow light challenges the gloom, but such artifice can’t resist the eternal inevitability of Nature for long.

There are unsettling sequences where conscientious editing, devious misdirection and a wall of silence hint at mysterious creatures hiding in the plain periphery of the shot, fuelling our feral collective imagination. These are taster masterclasses in how to generate and maintain suspense, and the film is at its best when it keeps its cards this close to its chest.

The script takes the idea of lycanthropy seriously, frankly too much so to be any fun. By taking a nuclear family out of the city and stranding them in the middle of nowhere, it purifies the concept into a reminder that no matter how civilised we like to think we are, no matter how far we’ve drifted from our evolutionary origins, we’re still animals like any other.

Christopher Abbott’s doleful, frayed-at-the-edges dad makes a sturdy vehicle for the theme of repressed masculine rage, as his frosty childhood relationship with his father threatens to rebound in adulthood on his own young family. The seeds are sown in their non-traditional domestic arrangement, by which he is the house-husband who lets his young daughter ply him with lipstick, and wife / mother Julia Garner is the breadwinner – stern, power-suited and severe of haircut. As a psychological core to the story it’s hardly subtle, and neither is the expository dialogue churned out of the actors’ mouths, no matter how hard they try to make it all sound natural.

But most of us will be here for that moment when the teeth are bared, the fur sprouts and the beast is finally unleashed. Well, don’t hold your breath. In The Invisible Man, Elisabeth Moss seized with both hands the role of a woman going crazy because nobody believed her boyfriend was trying to kill her, squeezing every drop of dramatic juice out of it.

Abbott’s character is more interior by design, and his emotional and physical transformation is more akin to Jeff Goldblum’s turn in David Cronenberg‘s version of The Fly, where the protagonist loses his mind and body by slow and painful increments. Highly subjective lighting and sound design and an avant-garde music score ensure that we’re right there losing them with him; but, partly because he’s robbed of the power of speech too, our sympathy for him wanes when it should wax.

Wolf Man reimagines the many tropes of its lupine subgenre in a modern context, in an admirable feat of technical accomplishment, but it’s trapped somewhere between the nobler instinct of high-minded thematic ideas and the baser instinct of pulp entertainment. Its impressionistic take on a well-worn legend won’t appeal to everyone, but its claustrophobic family drama and singular style of visual storytelling at least make it conspicuous in a landscape full of cliches.

-Stew Mott-