Sadly This ‘Wolf Man’ Has Fleas

Austrailian writer-director Leigh Whannell has quite the pedigree in the world of horror. He is the co-creator (along with director James Wan) of the long-lived and very lucrative Saw franchise. He ignited another horror brand as the sole screenwriter of Insidious (2010). His most recent directorial effort was his brilliant 2020 reimagining of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss. It delivered the tense violent thrills audiences expected while providing a subtle commentary on toxic masculinity, domestic violence and the complexities of victimhood.

So, why, oh why, is Whannell’s latest effort, Wolf Man, such a (sorry for this) ... dog? Whannell is far more talented than the product on the screen so that leads me to assume this film was hastily cobbled together for a much smaller budget ($ 15 million) than it had when Ryan Gosling was attached to the project ($ 60 million). Suddenly it was goodbye Gosling and goodbye $ 45 million. Whannell had to pick up the pieces and come up with a finished film. The results feel like a scaled down re-write after the original project collapsed. But, that’s sheerly speculation on my part.

What ends up on the screen is a very by-the-numbers werewolf-ish film. Grandpa disappears and is ultimately declared dead. Grandpa’s son and a father himself (Christopher Abbott), wife (Ozark’s Julia Garner) and daughter (Matilda Firth) go to Grandpa’s remote cabin in Oregon to pack up his effects. The film unspools over the course of the single disastrous night that follows.

Whannell has jettisoned most of the standard werewolf mythology. No full moons, no silver bullets, no ancients curses and the like, just a title card at the beginning of the film stating that wolf man sightings have been a phenomenon since indigenious peoples ruled the Americas. And that’s the problem with the film: there’s no meat on these narrative bones.

The Invisible Man was such a brilliant modernization of that classic tale that I kept waiting for Wolf Man to take a turn in an unexpected direction. It never does. The audience is always ahead of the action on screen. If you don’t anticipate every plot beat in this film well before it arrives, then you simply haven’t seen enough werewolf/wolfman movies.

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That said Whannell can still stage a suspenseful setpiece. There’s nothing wrong with his horror filmmaking chops. The “cold open” with Grandpa and his young son trapped in a deer blind by a creature of some sort gets the film off to a solid start. And there are several other well-conceived setups (the greenhouse sequence for one) that are ultimately given very brief payoffs. It’s as if they didn’t have the budget (and consequently the time) to properly bleed the suspense out of their ideas. The entire film feels rushed and messy.

Whannell’s work has always been smart, clever. But, here, the characters suffer from the horror film syndrome of making one idiotic decision after another because that’s what the film requires to send the action in its intended direction. The terrorized young family is in the remote cabin with no means of communication and no means of escape for nearly thirty minutes of screen time before someone looks out a window and spots Grandpa’s pickup truck parked outside. Really? (And don’t get me started on the idea that there’s a brand new truck battery and jumper cables sitting on Grandpa’s workbench in the basement.)

The proceedings feel very stagebound. We have a cabin, a barn, a greenhouse and the woods. The film is an endless series of frantic sprints from one location to the next and back again. I found myself thinking of that Geico commercial where the teens can either run through the cemetery or hide in the barn behind the chainsaws while the slasher killer rolls his eyes at their idiocy. In the case of Wolf Man, it’ll be the audience doing the eye-rolling.