Under the Cold Light of the Moon, Wolf Man Mewls

Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man starts well. Very well, even. Young Blake Lovell ventures deep into the Oregon woods to hunt and bond alongside his stern, vaguely militiaman father Grady (Sam Jaeger). Grady loves Blake but cannot understand his son’s tendency to daydream. To a point, his frustration is understandable—the woods of Oregon are a terrible place to get lost in yourself, especially when you’re carting around a live hunting rifle. But rather than meet Blake on his level, Grady just cranks his dour, distant discipline up further and further—especially after a close call with something feral and humanoid that Grady theorizes is what’s left of a missing hiker after contracting a disease mythologized since the earliest days of Oregon’s Indigenous communities.

Those first scenes are excellent filmmaking, building tension from the increasing presence of the feral hiker and Grady’s short, tightly wound fuse. Alas, the rest of Wolf Man does not match its opening act.

Thirty years later, Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a much better father to his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) than Grady ever was to him. However, he’s not nearly as good at processing his emotions and establishing discipline over his kid as he thinks he is. While he and his journalist spouse Charlotte (Julia Garner) love each other, they both know their marriage isn’t going all that well. When news arrives that Grady’s finally been declared dead after vanishing years before, Blake seizes on the chance for a reset: the Lovells can clear out Grady’s farm together, get some space from the speed and chaos of modern life, and spend real time together.

They never get the chance. Something feral and humanoid attacks them just before they make it to Grady’s, and although the family escapes an immediate mauling, Blake gets wounded. The wound changes Blake. Suddenly, a tarantula crawling on the ceiling sounds like someone jumping on the roof. Suddenly, his jaw cracks, and his teeth begin to fall out. Suddenly, language is impossible. Suddenly, he’s seeing everything in new colors, and his beloveds are terrifying specters. Blake has been infected, and the sickness is moving fast. The creature who infected him is still on the prowl. Charlotte and Ginger have each other, anything they can MacGuyver in Grady’s house, and the increasingly distant slivers of Blake left in an increasingly vicious body. It will be a long, bad night.

Wolf Man is a movie at odds with itself. In set-up, it aims to be character-based horror, with Blake’s lycanthropy the fanged manifestation of his fear that he’d repeat his father’s mistakes with Ginger, the worst possible way he could let loose the anger he’s been repressing. In execution, it tries to be a lean and mean werewolf thriller. Blake is infected within the first half hour, and his transformation progresses rapidly. Barring an unfortunate Oregonian and the feral hiker from the opening, the Lovells are the entirety of the cast, and spend most of Wolf Man trapped in Grady’s farmhouse.

In practice, Wolf Man rips itself apart. Abbott gets precious little time to show how the years have changed Adult Brady since that fateful day in 1995, and the speed with which his infection and transformation progress means that while he’s constantly present, after a certain point he’s essentially playing a different and much simpler character. Neither Garner nor Firth has the space to make their characters distinct or give them a drive beyond “survive.” The Lovells could potentially be interesting, dimensional protagonists, but they’d need time that Whannell and Corbett Tuck’s script doesn’t give them.

With so much of Wolf Man tied to the Lovell family drama, it’s far more sedate than it should be for a film built on someone transforming against their will into an animalistic embodiment of the unleashed id. Blake’s transformation happens quickly in terms of the movie’s timeline, but slowly in terms of actual screen time—to the point that it drags, especially when hopping between Blake’s progressively inhuman perspective and Charlotte’s decidedly human one. Wolf Man’s wolf men see the world in striking blue-green, a look that only gets more intense as the transformation deepens, and one that makes the contrast with the world as we know it stands out all the more. The trick is that while the contrast is effective, Wolf Man repeatedly falls back on it, stripping it of its power and impact. Once Blake goes nonverbal, his character becomes static. We know how he sees the world, and that does not change. Continually cutting back to his point of view doesn’t show how the Wolf Man differs from the man; it just pads the runtime.

Moreover, with such a small cast, the Wolf Men’s rampage isn’t all that much of a rampage. For a film about someone turning into a horrible flesh-eating monster and his loved ones’ desperate attempt to survive him, Wolf Man is downright restrained. The make-up and transformation are impressively grody and technically well-executed, but they aren’t scary. Wolf Man’s creatures aren’t so inept that they’d be beaten senseless by a random martial artist—as infamously happened in the MST3K classic Werewolf—but they never come across as specifically dangerous in the ways that make a great horror villain.

Wolf Man isn’t inexpertly made. It’s crafted with care, and the cast does what they can with what they have. But it’s at war with itself—too quick to take the time to delve into the fraught family history of the Lovells and how that shapes their crisis, too narrowly focused to let its Wolf Men really cut loose and get monstrous.

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