Sometimes, you’re so scared of your kids getting scars, you become the thing that scars them.
In “Wolf Man,” Blake (Christopher Abbott) voices this thought to his young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), drawing upon his experiences growing up in rural Oregon with his own strict father (Sam Jaeger). The quote brings up questions of cycles of violence, of the ways in which parents inadvertently pass their childhood trauma down to their own children, often in the name of protection. Those are apt ideas for a movie like “Wolf Man” to consider, drawing upon base instinct as much as they do human nature. If only the movie could live up to the promise of its premise.
With his last film – 2020’s “The Invisible Man” – writer/director Leigh Whannell turned the classic Universal horror film into one about domestic violence and gaslighting. He takes a similar approach with “Wolf Man,” attempting to update the 1941 film into one with a more modern sensibility. But most thematic throughlines in “Wolf Man” are quickly lost through half-baked characterization and muddled relationship dynamics, and any fun there was to be had is quickly wiped away by a level of tragedy the film never earns.
“Wolf Man” opens with Blake and his father, Grady, on a hunting trip where they’re terrorized by a largely unseen humanoid-type animal that roams the wilderness near their small farm. When Blake grows up, he cuts off all contact with his father, eventually learning that he has disappeared. When the state of Oregon declares his father legally dead, Blake takes Ginger and his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner) to Oregon so that he can pack up his childhood home. When Blake is wounded by a creature similar to the one that frightened him as a child, he begins to change into something terrifying.
With “The Invisible Man,” Whannell showed a solid eye for scares (a talent that’s well earned – he has been writing horror movies like “Saw” and “Insidious” for years). “Wolf Man” has a few set pieces where that experience comes through, and the make-up and special effects combined with Abbott’s commitment to the physicality of the role does sometimes make for an effective horror moment. But the make-up and prosthetics – which has a slightly campy, old-fashioned feel to it (think a slightly less extreme version of a villain from “Charmed” or “Buffy”) – doesn’t gel with the film’s dark, dire atmosphere, and moments that should be unsettling often read as unintentional humor. The action itself mostly involves a lot of running between various structures on Blake’s father’s small piece of land – from the main house to the car, to the greenhouse, to the barn, and back. It gets old after a while.
But the biggest flaws at the center of “Wolf Man” have more to do with the connections – or lack thereof – between the characters. Blake’s relationship with his father forms the root of the conflict in “Wolf Man.” Their bond was a tumultuous one; Grady treated his son as more of a soldier than a child, complete with military corner standards on bedsheets and call times of 0700 hours. But in the opening scenes of “Wolf Man” – probably the film’s best stretch – the audience gets a better sense of Grady’s character than it does of anyone else in the film. He is not a caring father, lacking an emotional connection with his child and instead resorting to harshness and scorn. But through Jaeger’s performance, you come to understand – with minimal screen time – that despite his inability to show it, this man does care for his child in his way.
As an adult, Blake is understandably left confused and scarred by his experience with his father, afraid that Grady’s worst impulses will sneak into Blake’s relationship with his daughter. The issue is, despite the movie hinting at this possibility, Blake is really nothing like his father at all. He has a loving and affectionate relationship with Ginger, filled with laughter and inside jokes. The one time he barely loses his temper with her, it’s after she hops up on a traffic barrier roughly two yards away from speeding cars, disregarding her father’s order to get down. Out of fear, Blake grabs Ginger and raises his voice, immediately softening when he realizes he has scared her. He apologizes before reminding her (and the audience) he’s “not that guy.” Like we ever thought he was to begin with.
If we’re supposed to believe that Blake’s parental trauma has been haunting his close relationships, there’s not a ton of evidence to support that fact. On the other hand, if Blake’s status as a good father (which he seems to be) is supposed to further the tragedy that the movie is reaching for, that doesn’t really pan out either. Before the family makes their way to Oregon, the movie alludes to problems in Blake and Charlotte’s marriage – these problems are shown to us via a very forced argument about whether Charlotte should take a work phone call in the living room or not, and then with plodding exposition later on.
“Wolf Man” might have worked better as the tragedy it wants to be if the couple at its center were simply madly in love. But Charlotte and Blake are not supposed to feel like two people in the throes of love. However, the problem is they don’t seem like two people who feel any type of way about each other at all. There’s nothing between them – no friction, no tenderness, no history. When Charlotte finally says the words “I love you” to Blake as he’s slowly transforming into the titular wolf man, he can’t understand her, the human words becoming garbled in his addled, feral state. But even if he could understand her, something isn’t clicking – her words are forced and flat.
The movie also sets up tension between Charlotte and Ginger at its beginning, but once again, tells the audience that there is tension between two people instead of actually showing it. “Wolf Man” purports to be about familial relationships, and the things we internalize from our childhood and carry with us into adulthood. I just wish any of those themes were actually visible onscreen.
