Wolf Man review: Leigh Whannell explores fatherhood and fury

Having done well with a fresh take on The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell and Blumhouse were invited to tackle another of the studio’s famous monsters. Whannell’s Invisible Man used H.G. Wells’ see-through maniac to explore coercive control in the framework of a shuddery suspense story. His Wolf Man is another exploration of toxic masculinity, from the viewpoint of a man struggling with his own instincts rather than a woman on the receiving end of the stalking. The protagonist vows not to be the monster to his daughter his father was to him, even when he’s turning into a literal monster.  It’s a solid underpinning for a basic one-eventful-night-in-the-woods movie, though its version of the werewolf legend owes more to David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly than any lore set down in The Wolf Man (1941) or The Wolfman (2010).

Set in the Pacific Northwest (played by New Zealand), the film opens with a boy as terrified by his paranoid father as he is the heavy-breathing creature who menaces them in the forest. Thirty years later, Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) inherits a remote farm when his missing father is declared dead. He drives his workaholic journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and moppet daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) to the backwoods to look over the abandoned property. A shock encounter on the road puts the family in crisis mode.  itten by a beast who walks upright, Blake begins a painful transformation accompanied by a sudden onset wolf-senses (effectively conveyed in camera).  While struggling with new urges to scratch and devour, he still has to defend his family from the monster who cursed him.

What distinguishes Universal’s Wolf Man from any average werewolf from another studio is the look created by Jack Pierce for Lon Chaney Jr in 1941. Make-up designer Jane O’Kane and prosthetics specialist Arjen Tuiten homage the Pierce/Chaney Wolf Man without copying it exactly. The standout feature of this Wolf Man is Abbott’s performance as a non-toxic househusband trying not to become his father. For Blake, being a werewolf (a word coyly not used) is almost a liberation from his strained attempt to be mild-mannered and even-tempered. When bitten, he has permission to growl. The crux of the story is whether becoming a monster automatically makes Blake a Bad Dad, but the film shifts focus to a snarly runaround as the imperilled mother and daughter cope with two generations of fanged, clawed, off-the-leash man-monsters.

 Wolf Man is out now. Read our interview with director Leigh Whannell here. 

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