Friday, January 17, 2025

Weekend Screen Scene: Wolf Man

Wolf Man, a reboot of the classic Universal character, was announced back in 2014, and was originally set to star Ryan Gosling. But when Universal's plans for a Dark Universe - a cinematic universe conceptually similar to Marvel and DC's cinematic universes - ended up dead on arrival with the 2017 reboot of The Mummy, plans to tie all these monster movies together were scrapped. Instead, Universal has released some stand-alone reboots of classic monster movies, including the aforementioned Mummy, Renfield, and The Invisible Man.

Which brings us back to Wolf Man, which also comes from The Invisible Man director Leigh Whannell. I enjoyed The Invisible Man, which I thought was a clever modern twist on "invisible" monsters, both literal and figurative. And I can see that Whannell is trying to do something similar with Wolf Man, turning it into a story about the horror of generational trauma, and also, you know, a werewolf. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work.

Christopher Abbott and Julie Garner star as Blake and Charlotte Lovell, San Francisco-based writers (we know they live in San Francisco because of the establishing shot of the skyline, and also because the one street scene - not actually shot in SF - includes a suspicious amount of homeless people on the sidewalk), who are parents to young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). When Blake gets news that his father, after disappearing years before, has been officially pronounced dead, he decides a visit to the remote cabin that filled his childhood with fear would be a great place to take his family.

Wolf Man wastes no time throwing the family into chaos; there's no settling into the cabin and getting comfy for this clan, and that's one of the film's biggest problems. Given no meaningful time to know these characters and care about them, when they're faced with danger and difficult decisions, we really have no investment in the outcome. And for a movie that's not even two hours long, stretches of it are incredibly boring.

There are some interesting aspects. We're given a glimpse into the world as the werewolf experiences it - in monochromatic color, eerily attuned to sounds in far off rooms, and suddenly unable to understand what people around him are saying, like a dog just hearing garbled sounds from its owner's mouth. And the transformation - every werewolf movie has to have one! - is gross in some surprising ways, and sticks primarily to practical effects, which is refreshing to see. I just wish those effects were a little...better. And that goes for the movie as a whole.

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