Skip to main content

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


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Question

    I spend a lot of effort in this space trying to champion the musical genre as the peak of cinematic achievement.  And so it sometimes surprises my associates to find out that, no, I wasn't at all raised in a household that particularly favored musicals. I wasn't the kid who went out for the annual school musical or anything. My environment wasn't exactly hostile toward these things, but it actually did very little to nurture my study of the genre.  Cinderella (1950)      I obviously had exposure through things like the Disney animated musicals, which absolutely had a profound effect on the larger musical genre . But I didn’t see The Sound of Music until high school, and I didn’t see Singin’ in the Rain until college.      Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , though, it was just always there. And so I guess that's really where I got infected. I'm referring to the 1954 musical directed by Stanley Donen with music by Gene de Paul ,...

Lamb: The Controversy of Vulnerability

In a landscape where the court of public opinion is ruled by sensationalism, where there is a reward for snap judgments and “thumbs down” reactions, it is imperative that we continue to train ourselves in the art of nuance and ambiguity. Some things aren’t easily classified as one thing or another, as good or bad, and they reveal limitations within our individual and collective perspective. This life and its overlapping matrices create more pressure points and junctions than we can hope to avoid. And so, we expose ourselves to contradictions not to desensitize ourselves or become permissive, but to add texture to our definitions.  Which brings me today’s subject,  Lamb, a 2015 independent film directed by Ross Partridge. Based on the novel by Bonnie Nadzam, the film finds a despondent 47-year-old man, David Lamb (played by Partridge himself), who strikes up a friendship with a neglected 11-year-old girl named Tommie (Oona Laurence). Their relationship is a sort of ac...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Making Room for Classic Movies

Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?”      When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.”  My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …”  Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws     In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...

REVIEW: Superman

      I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.      The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.      And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later.  I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.     I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

REVIEW: Lilo & Stitch

       By now the system errors of Disney's live-action remake matrix are well codified. These outputs tend to have pacing that feels like it was okayed by a chain store manager trying to lower the quarterly statement. They also show weird deference to very specific gags from their animated source yet don't bother to ask whether they fit well in the photorealistic world of live-action. And combing through the screenplay, you always seem to get snagged on certain lines of dialogue that someone must have thought belonged in a children's movie ("Being gross is against galactic regulation!").      These are all present in this  summer's live-action reinvention of "Lilo & Stitch." But mercifully, this remake allows itself to go off-script here and there. The result may be one of the stronger Disney remakes ... whatever that's worth.     The 2002 animated masterpiece by Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders (who voices the little blue alien in b...

REVIEW: Artemis Fowl

Fans of Eion Colfer's teen fantasy book, Artemis Fowl, have no doubt been eyeing this movie adaptation with some unrest in between all the shuffling of release dates and strict secrecy pertaining to the movie's plot and development. A beacon of hope amidst this was the assurance of Kenneth Brannagh's proficiency as a director. Unfortunately, Brannagh just appears complicit to this movie's ultimate dive-bombing. Brannagh remains one of my favorite directors currently working, some of my favorite works of his (such as his 2015 reimagining of Cinderella) even came from under the Disney banner, so I can only imagine what must have happened to Brannagh that caused him to forget how to competently direct a film. The film follows 12-year-old super genius, Artemis Fowl, (Ferdia Shaw) son of controversial public figure, Artemis Fowl Sr. (Colin Farrell) the only person for whom Artemis has any respect. When his father mysteriously disappears and Artemis receives a sinister ransom...

Year in Review: 2020

January 1st, 2020 was one of the most stressful days of my life. For weeks, January 2nd had been marked in red ink as the premiere date for this weird new project. My first three essays for my new blog were all spruced and pruned and ready for exhibition. I had spent months eyeing this date from a comfortable, hypothetical distance. Hanging over the precipice was giving me vertigo. It's not like I wasn't used to writing about film. This is more or less what I did for three years working for a film degree. Goodness, I have notebooks as far back as 5 th  grade full of writings about favorite films--I've technically been doing this for a long time. But this is the first time I’ve shared my work with the public. And when you're writing for an audience, you feel transparent. Naked. But I took a step into the oblivion anyway, and this blog has been a labor of love for me over the last year. Easily one of the best decisions I've ever made. If you're interested Some i...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...