WOLF MAN starts out promisingly enough establishing a theme of generational trauma and the eeriness of the wild wood while neatly exploring the hunter-becoming-the-hunted idiom. Full points to the excellent cinematography that captures the opalescent otherworldliness of the mist-shrouded Oregon wilderness, and a cast that takes the story seriously, it’s just a shame that said story devolves into a veritable cornucopia of characters making stupid decisions, and a monster that patiently waits for them to jump-start a truck before smashing in the windshield and forcing them to make further stupid decisions.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
We begin 30 years ago when kid Blake Lowell (Zac Chandler) is being emotionally scarred by his overly protective backwoods father (craggy Sam Jaeger), reminded constantly that death is always at the doorstep and that one bad move, such as enticing wild mushrooms, can end everything forever. On one momentous hunting trip, the two will encounter the Face of the Wolf, or so it is termed by the Native Americans of the place, and establish the supernatural element that will come into play later.
Jump to the present, grown-up and between writing jobs Blake (Christopher Abbot), is spending a magical day in his new home city of San Francisco with his young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). We know it is magical because they are bantering, bonding, and she is tricked out in a pink tutu and angel wings that don’t quite go with the substantial knit hat that keeps the cold at bay. Into this interlude intrudes Blake’s ci-mentioned generational trauma, as he, ahem, barks at Ginger when she fails to obey his order to return to the safety of the sidewalk from the tightrope of traffic cones on which she is balancing. Their relationship can support that slip, but the one he has with his journalist wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner) is more tenuous. As is Charlotte’s with Ginger. Those tensions will come to a head when Blake receives word that his long-missing father has been declared legally dead, and the family heads to the, further ahem, cabin in the woods, to pack it up and get in some healing quality family time over the summer.
If it all wasn’t going to go terribly wrong, we wouldn’t have a film, of course, so naturally Blake gets lost in the backwoods from which he fled so many years ago, only to run into old pal Derek (Benedict Harie) who will show them the right road to Lowell homestead. We are reminded of how strange this backwoods is by Charlotte’s unease with Derek’s laconic manner, and by the big rifle he carries. We are further reminded when something weird appears in the road, causing Blake to swerve, Derek to disappear with a blood trail, and the family is forced to hoof it to Blake’s childhood home as darkness falls on what will be a very, very long night.
Now, I will grant you that making the story of one man’s transformation into a wolfman new and novel is a great hurdle, and director/co-writer Leigh Wannell has found a few nice touches, from the gradual transition over several hours, to a nicely re-imagined final creature, to having the camera swing into the proto-wolfman’s point of view. There, the light changes, human eyes take on an unnatural glow, and human speech becomes hopelessly garbled. The innovations, alas, begin and end there. He retains, for instance the trope of the wolfman retaining his pants even when the rest of his ensemble rips away. There is also the curious inertia to the family trapped in the house that, coupled with a lack of cohesion that fails to create any sense of internal logic, renders the effort risible. Not even the sight of Blake, gnawing with feral determination at his own arm as the wolfman infection grows within evokes the requisite sense of disgust, much less horror. All sense of looming destruction loses its narrative punch as we wait with increasing impatience to see what boneheaded move this family will next make. Even taking into consideration that terror impedes rational thought, these choices are just plain silly, designed more to prolong the film’s runtime rather than amplify the audience experience. And it shows.
And this is a shame because Abbott, Garner and Firth are all marvelously affecting as a family on the verge of dysfunction trying to reconcile before it is too late. Abbott, in particular, finds the many inner struggles in a character fighting with his emotional programming to be a better father than his father was. WOLF MAN looks great, but suffers such entropy that by the end, it has resolved into a moribund oeuvre that leaves us frustrated and more than a little bored.
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