Wolf Man review: Woof!

Stanley Kubrick famously shot the indoor scenes of his lavish costume drama Barry Lyndon by candlelight. Not to be outdone, Aussie filmmaker Leigh Whannell has now made a monster movie that often appears to have been shot by nothing but the glow of the moon. Okay, so our big satellite in the sky is probably not actually what illuminates the wolfman of Wolf Man, a father and husband who — like the caretaker of Kubrick’s haunted hotel — goes feral on his family in woodland isolation. But a strictly lunar light source would explain why it’s so damn difficult to make out anything that happens in this movie. The abandoned Dark Universe lives on through the sheer duskiness of Whannell’s imagery. Pray your local multiplex runs its projector bulbs on the brightest possible setting.

Though dimming the lights is a common strategy for obscuring not-so-special effects — you can’t scoff at what you can’t see! — Wolf Man has nothing to hide in that department, at least for a while. The makeup work used to slowly shag-up Christopher Abbott is convincing enough in its sharpening points and creeping tufts. Most of the movie takes place at a secluded farmhouse in Oregon — the childhood home to which Abbott’s Blake Lovell has returned to sort through the affairs of his father, long missing and finally presumed dead. After he’s bitten by something furry en route, Blake begins to change, much to the mounting terror of his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth).

Do all men become their fathers over time, as surely as they get hair where there was no hair before? Blake inherits more than a rickety property from pops, just as this Wolf Man inherits daddy issues from both its predecessors, the 1941 classic starring Lon Chaney and the 2010 version starring Benicio del Toro. Here, lycanthropy is a metaphor for a bad temper. We see that in the prologue, an ominous hunting trip that establishes the oppressive parental intensity Blake endured and absorbed as a boy. Cut to present day, and he’s a sensitive, enlightened city slicker, oversized stuffed bear in one paw, his daughter’s in the other. But the cycle of brooding masculinity is not, he discovers, so easily broken.

The setup is promising, dramatically and atmospherically. And then the family gets to that old house, and the movie settles into a curiously unimaginative funk. This Wolf Man is like a rough draft of itself, murky in more than its visuals. Whannell has cited David Cronenberg’s goopy masterpiece The Fly as an inspiration for its scenes of messy mutation — the detaching nails and teeth that marked last year’s The Substance as another oozing offspring of that ’80s body-horror milestone. But Wolf Man is neither gross nor humane enough to earn the comparison. It doesn’t endear us to poor, sick-as-a-dog Blake the way Cronenberg did to a bugging-out Jeff Goldblum. We don’t really get to know the man behind the wolf.

The actors seem as stranded as their characters. Whannell, returning to the single setting, tight timeframe, and claustrophobic tension of his breakout screenplay for Saw, never gives them the space to develop into multi-dimensional people. Because Wolf Man treats lycanthropy as a one-way voyage — there’s no anguished return to a human state, no panicked wait for the rise of the next moon — Abbott basically disappears into his prosthetics, robbed of all but the faintest glimmers of discernible consciousness. And rarely has Garner seemed so disconnected from a role; her dread was thicker and more credible in The Royal Hotel, where she played a woman fending off a less supernatural breed of stalking male predator.

You watch Wolf Man and wonder how it could come from the same filmmaker who so thrillingly upgraded another Universal Monster for the big screen. His last movie, The Invisible Man, was smart and scary and topical — a popcorn horror flick that turned the translucent title menace into an avatar of tech-bro misogyny. (How spookily serendipitous that this tale of a wealthy, gaslighting abuser rose from the ashes of a Johnny Depp vehicle.) His Wolf Man is not devoid of ideas, but its meditation on how paternal protectiveness can morph overnight into overbearing tyranny never takes an especially coherent shape. And there are only quick flashes of Whannell’s virtuosity as a craftsman, like a car crash that affixes the camera to a tumbling SUV, or the way the director visualizes Blake’s mental deterioration as a phantom realm of distorted voices and ethereal fog.

It’s as if Whannell never figured the film out or really pushed beyond his basic outline for a horror movie about lineage, fatherhood, and terminal disease. The nagging impression of incompletion goes, too, for the final-stage monster design. Every werewolf picture worth its weight in silver gives us a good transformation scene, but by the end of Abbott’s knuckle-shifting, jaw-distending makeover into a mangy mutt, you’re left with something too manlike and unmemorable. This is the Wolf Man of legend? Chaney’s was scarier and more elaborate, too. The beast here looks half-conceived, and so does his movie, a rather dull, dreary creature feature seemingly arrested at the crescent stage of its development.

Wolf Man is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.