Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man uses werewolf mythology to tell a sombre tale of a mother who refuses to give up on her family when her life is in grave danger. The film tells its story with some restraint and goes for a more slow-burn approach, eschewing the usual jump scares the genre often utilises. However, this restraint sometimes hinders the film, making it feel overly serious. Thankfully, Wolf Man never becomes an inert exercise, as the film makes up for what it lacks in scares with exceptional practical effects and stellar performances.
Director: Leigh Whannell
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth
The film opens with young Blake Lovell and his stern father on a hunting expedition just off their farmhouse in the woods of Oregon. Terrified of his father, Blake addresses him as "sir" whenever the old man talks to him in a raised voice. Suddenly, a bear-like creature, which is only audible and not visible, attacks the two, and the father somehow manages to shoot and scare it away into the woods. Blake calls his father ‘dad’ for the first time here, but before the horrific experience can bring them closer together, he learns a dark secret about his father and the old man disappears into the woods in search of the creature.
Fast forward to the present day, and Blake is now an adult and a father (Christopher Abbott) to young Ginger Lovell (Matilda Firth). Blake has anger issues, as he occasionally lashes out at his daughter. But she is more close to him than her mother Charlotte (Julia Garner) because he is a writer who works from home, whereas she is a journalist. Charlotte is envious of this and she tells her husband how they have a growing sense of empty space between them. But around this time, Blake receives his father's death certificate, prompting him to return to the Oregon farmhouse with his wife and child. The trip takes a terrifying turn when a werewolf comes out of the woods, scratches Blake and infects him. It then becomes a cat-and-mouse game between the werewolf and the family of three.
It is fascinating to see the slow transformation of Blake into a werewolf. In terms of body horror, Wolf Man echoes David Cronenberg's films, such as The Fly. After a point, the line between man and beast blurs, making it difficult to discern what remains of Blake within the werewolf. At any moment, he can attack the mother and child, but the doting daughter asks the mother to let him in and the mother cannot deny her request. There is also a clever twist that adds some weight to the threadbare plot with a heredity angle, although Whannell and his co-writer Corbett Tuck do not develop it further. Another plot element that could use more exploration is Blake's decision to return to the farmhouse, solely to retrieve his father's belongings, which seems ill-advised and raises questions about his motivations. Is he unaware of the creature's presence near the farmhouse? Why would he knowingly expose his family to such danger? The film's narrative relies heavily on Blake's return to the farmhouse, but Whannell fails to adequately explore his motivations and the nature of his relationship with his father.
What Whannell does really well is extract some fine performances from his leads. Behind all the prosthetics, in Abbott, you can see a man desperately wanting to get back to his former self and reconnect with his family. He is gentle as a doting father but menacing as a werewolf. Young Matilda Firth delivers a convincing performance as Ginger Lovell, a girl who cannot stop loving her father even when he turns into a beast. But the best performance comes from Julia Garner, who is in stark contrast here even with a gun in hand from her Ozark character. Garner does not have much material to work with here; she is in a confined space, confronting a mythical creature and dealing with a daughter who does not show enough affection towards her. But the actor makes her emotions palpable, adding nuance to her performance, and showing the quiet strength of a woman who does not know when to give up.