“Wolf Man,” Leigh Whannell’s feature follow-up to his exceptional 2020 thriller, “The Invisible Man,” is a strange beast. More touching than flat-out terrifying, the movie pings with echoes of its predecessor. Both feature a heroine menaced by a radically altered romantic partner; both are headlined by potent female actors (first Elisabeth Moss, now Julia Garner); and both construct their violence on a framework of unresolved psychological trauma.
For Blake (Christopher Abbott), emotional distress was cemented during a rural childhood overshadowed by two, almost equally petrifying threats: the feral sounds of an unseen animal crashing about in the woods, and the flares of fury unleashed by his extravagantly protective father (Sam Jaeger). Now an unemployed writer in his 30s and living in San Francisco, Blake is exhibiting similar bursts of temper whenever his small daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), is insufficiently cautious. His marriage to Charlotte (Garner), a hardworking journalist, is strained, and the two can barely communicate. It’s clear that Blake needs to change, though maybe not as disgustingly as the scriptwriters have in mind.
As everyone knows, the best strategy for healing a relationship is to drag your family to the backwoods of Oregon and the inherited childhood home you haven’t visited in decades. It may be a dusty dump with no mod cons, but it still boasts the murderous supernatural creature that haunted your tender years and continues to snarl and snuffle in the undergrowth. It’s no surprise, then, when a childhood pal shows up just long enough to warn, somewhat unnecessarily, of dangerous local wildlife before a shocking attack leaves him kaput. It also leaves Blake badly bitten and Charlotte probably questioning her life choices.
In one sense, “Wolf Man” is a generic, and not especially scary, cabin-in-the-woods frightener that leans too often on tenebrous lighting and ear-shredding sound effects. Despite some gnarly moments, the movie lacks the gangbuster pacing and psychological perversity that made “The Invisible Man” such a rush. Suffering most is Garner, whose Charlotte — a woman facing terror on both sides of her front door — is so sketchily written she spends much of the film staring, dumbstruck, at the gibbous monstrosity her husband is gradually becoming.
Yet the extreme pathos of Blake’s plight is palpable, and Whannell is determined to make us feel it. To that end, his neatest trick is to use Blake’s point of view to emphasize his confusion and distress. As Blake transforms into a swollen, oozing wretch who gnaws frantically on his own wounds, his family appears as glowing-eyed aliens, their words a jumble of indecipherable sounds. And while the makeup artist Rick Baker’s work on “An American Werewolf in London” (1981) remains the gold standard of transformation scenes, the painstaking efforts of Whannell’s practical-effects team are commendably gooey.
A nebulous hint of abuse (confronted blatantly in “The Invisible Man”) hovers over “Wolf Man,” most clearly in its suggestion that a foul temper can be passed down like a family heirloom. However, had Blake and Charlotte truly wanted to improve their communication, I still think couples therapy would have been the way to go.
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