Weak acting, direction plague suspense-challenged horror remake ‘Wolf Man’
“Wolf Man” — 1.5 stars
Leigh Whannell’s sometimes ridiculous, suspense-challenged and emotionally muted horror tale “Wolf Man” tosses out all the traditional conventions we expect in the werewolf genre.
The magical transformations caused by a full moon?
The use of silver weapons to slay the man-beast?
Gone.
But that’s OK.
Just as classic zombie movies morphed from reanimated corpses into virus-induced cannibals, co-writer Whannell reimagines the werewolf as a virus-induced figure suffering from “Hills Fever,” or as Native American lore refers to it, a man “with a wolf face.”
The Universal Studios press release for “Wolf Man” begins with this question: “What if someone you loved became something else?”
Presumably, “Wolf Man” intends to be a metaphor for a crippling disease, such as Alzheimer’s, that slowly alters loved ones into strangers who no longer recognize the people close to them.
That could easily apply to other horror films, especially David Cronenberg’s vastly superior 1986 remake of the original 1958 movie “The Fly,” during which a woman watches her romantic interest, a scientist, slowly evolve into an insect.
Here, Christopher Abbott plays Blake, a San Francisco husband and dad who inherits his childhood homestead stuck in the deep, deep woods of rural Oregon.
His tough, survivalist father (Sam Jaeger) vanished years ago and has been pronounced legally dead. Blake persuades his unhappy, professional wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) to accompany him in a rented van to empty out the old house.
She agrees, and their young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), tags along.
The family barely gets to the homestead late at night when Blake wrecks the van while trying to avoid hitting what appears to be a beast on two legs.
The family makes a desperate dash to the house while something big and mean chases them. Once inside, Blake, Charlotte and Ginger hardly feel safe.
A creature prowling around the house should be scary enough. Then Blake begins to lose his hair and his teeth fall out. By the time he starts eating his own arm, we know something wicked this way has already come, and it’s in the house.
Sounds like on-the-edge-of-your-seat riveting stuff, right?
Except that it isn’t.
These characters seldom react the way we’d expect, especially Charlotte, who registers all the empathy and vulnerability of Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratchet in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Charlotte’s set expression seems invariably bored or tired, whether she’s talking to her husband or squaring off with a creature about to kill her.
Ginger fares slightly better in reacting to the horrors at hand, but she has been saddled with a screenplay filled with writerly gimmicks — such as pretending she can read her father’s mind — instead of sentences that a freaked-out girl watching her dad become a wolf might actually say.
Whannell overloads not only on POV shots of Blake’s infared-like “wolf vision,” but on moments in which characters do very little to propel the narrative.
“Wolf Man” is a severe disappointment, especially because Whannell wrote and directed Elizabeth Moss’ 2020 vehicle “The Invislble Man,” a smart and surprising update of Universal’s classic 1933 thriller.
It did not help that “Wolf Man” was screened for critics in Auditorium 11 at Chicago’s AMC River East 21, where light pollution on both sides of the screen made the movie’s many night scenes almost unwatchable, therefore rendering it extremely challenging for viewers to remain immersed in the story.
Then again, the direction and editing were already doing that.
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Starring: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
Directed by: Leigh Whannell
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated R for language, gory violence. 101 minutes.