Wolf Man
Leigh Whannell’s remake of the 1941 Universal chiller has far too little flesh on its bones and far too much shadow.
An American werewolf in Oregon: Julia Garner and Matilda Firth
Photo by Nicola Dove, Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Just two weeks ago, Robert Eggers brought us a remake of the 1922 Nosferatu. Now Leigh Whannell, co-creator of the Saw franchise, brings us a remake of Universal Pictures’ 1941 The Wolf Man. The problem with bringing such titles back from the dead is that cinema is now such a realistic medium that what passed muster eighty years ago now looks absurd. To camouflage such incongruity, Whannell has opted to shoot most of his family-under-siege chiller in the dark. By the final scenes, there is so little available light that it’s hard to know what is actually going on. For his cult classic An American Werewolf in London (1981), director John Landis was so proud of his animatronic effects that he shot James Naughton’s lycanthropic transformation in the full glare of the studio lights. He also added lashings of humour to dissipate the preposterousness of it all.
Before this, Whannell brought us the reboot of Universal’s 1933 The Invisible Man, which was a far more credible thing, utilising modern technology to its considerable advantage. Here, he has to rely on half-glimpsed forms in the Oregon woods, presumably to prey on the deep recesses of our imagination. But the congested backstory merely slows the narrative down to a sloth’s pace, the ennui of which no amount of elaborate sound effects can alleviate.
What was presumably a very slender treatment (co-written by Whannell and his wife Corbett Tuck) is teased out here with variations of the cabin-in-the-woods scenario, of which we have had more than our fill of late. The three central performers do the best that they can under the circumstances, although the dialogue does little to bring their characters alive (“Sometimes when you're a daddy, you're so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them”).
Christopher Abbott is Blake Lovell, a writer between jobs, who is married to Charlotte, a successful journalist, although they might as well have been a baker and a sous chef for all we know about their work. More interesting is the young Matilda Firth as the couple’s daughter, Ginger, who purports to be able to read their minds, although this novelty comes to nothing. And Julia Garner, who has exhibited enormous range in Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019) and in the Netflix series Ozark and Inventing Anna, is not provided much here to sink her teeth into. Unfortunately, the unconvincing family dynamic and the abundance of poorly lit interiors do little to suspend our disbelief. If you are content to believe that a man can turn into a wolf, then maybe you will get more out of this misguided malarkey than this critic did.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Benedict Hardie, Sam Jaeger, Leigh Whannell (voice only).
Dir Leigh Whannell, Pro Jason Blum, Screenplay Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck, Ph Stefan Duscio, Pro Des Ruby Mathers, Ed Andy Canny, Music Benjamin Wallfisch, Costumes Sarah Voon, Sound P.K. Hooker and Will Files.
Blumhouse Productions/Cloak & Co.-Universal Pictures.
102 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 17 January 2025. Cert. 15.
