REVIEW: Wolf Man

The thing about any figure as iconic as The Wolf Man is ... you already know how his story ends because there's only one way it can end. Much in the same way that any "King Kong" movie has to end with the ape falling off of the Empire State Building. Any other ending just feels incongruent. Grafted from some other story. The equation can only produce a single sum. As Maria Ouspenskaya warned us in the original Wolf Man, "So tears run to a predestined end."

I'll break the film critic's seal here a little and say that, if you love the Wolf Man figure, then you already know what happens to him at the end of Leigh Whannel's film, and you already basically know why.

But I don't for a second count that as a bad thing. Reinvention is easy. Doing your homework, that takes commitment. And Whannel's new film does its homework.

Here, our Wolf Man is Blake, a loving father living in the city with his daughter, Ginger, and his wife, Charlotte. The story sees Blake and Charlotte, at a crossroads in their marriage, deciding to return to the cabin of Blake's youth where he lived with his father, who disappeared into the woods years ago.

But no sooner has night fallen than something, a creature with both human and animal characteristics, sends their car careening over a cliff. Before they've scampered under moonlight to the safety of Blake's old cabin, the creature rakes Blake with its terrible claws. The creature continues to menace them throughout the night, but as a terrifying metamorphosis takes over Blake, something far more monstrous than teeth or claws might tear this family apart before daylight.

A lot of these motifs can be traced directly to the 1941 film: a gentle man of good manners returns to his father's home, he is attacked by something supernatural yet also human, and suddenly he is put in a position to question whether he has the capacity to hurt the people he loves the most. This connective tissue is what gives the film so much authority, and a trustworthy bank of ideas to draw from.

There are also some tricks in reserve that won't reveal themselves until you see the film for yourself: the trailers do pull a bit of a sleight of hand, distorting exactly what monster is chasing what person and how we all feel about that, which keeps the audience guessing. Abbot's Wolf Man differs from Chaney's some eighty years ago in one distinct way. Of course, whether or not that matters ... is one bit of insight I'll let audiences discover for themselves.

Whannel says he started writing this film during the global pandemic of 2020. The film is not set during this period, but you can feel the chill of the film living under its shadow. Before long, the film retreats into a landscape that feels all too familiar to a world under lockdown--that dreadful sense of being the only people in the world facing off against something unseeable and relentless. You also find this with the minimal cast of only four or five speaking parts (plus a younger version of Blake, played by Zac Chandler in the film's prologue).

The centerpiece is obviously the Wolf Man himself, Christopher Abbot. The softness he brings to Blake makes the prospect of any kind of violence from him seem unimaginable, and yet the beast takes over him on a subterranean level, in a way that it only could in the hands of a master actor. Julia Garner has the deliberate feel of a lamp that has gone out. Ideal ground for her spark to flare when the monster comes calling for her and her family. Ginger, meanwhile, emerges as the least complicated of the trio. The writing generally has her default to tried and true talking points of child characters in these kinds of stories, but human-cupcake Matilda Firth certainly doesn't take away from the role.

Almost as essential as any onscreen actor in a werewolf story is the performance of the make-up artist. You think the greatest trick in this magician's bag is burying Christopher Abbot under something feral and rabid, and so you're caught off guard when you see this mangy creature emitting authentic human emotion even at the height of the film's tension. Credit also to the sound work of this film, including and especially composer Benjamin Wallfisch, for imbuing this beastly assault with the beating tick that feels genuinely invasive.

The film asks a lot of questions--questions about family, questions about heredity, questions about human nature. The film homes in on the most essential of these in its closing act. Others go unanswered, but not because the film has forgotten about them. Rather it offers the grace of recognition, catharsis, the assurance that everyone in the theater is asking these questions together, and that can be enough for a moment.

--The Professor

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