Here we are in January and there’s a bad horror movie right on cue.
Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a startlingly good reinterpretation of a classic horror monster movie. It did a thing so few intellectual property reboots would dare -taking the concept, themes, and occasional character names of the original source, but crafting an entirely new and interesting story onto it from a modern lens. It felt fresh and relevant in a way recent iterations of The Mummy or Dracula have not. And Blumhouse took note of that, declaring it would be the start of a whole series re-contextualizing the classic monster brands.
That plan it would appear was thrown out sometime between then and now, after their second venture -a Wolf-Man movie starring Ryan Gosling to be directed by Derek Cianfrance- fell apart. For the Wolf-Man movie we are now faced with, Blumhouse went back to the drawing board and roped Whannell back to create a significantly less impressive version of this old story, one that more or less does simply put a cheap coat of modern paint over the 1941 film, finds no new insights or threads to build off, and sucks just about any life or light out of premise proper.
The Wolf Man here is destined to be Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) who grew up in rural Oregon with a father paranoid about a strange creature they spotted briefly while hunting in the dense woods. On his death, Blake takes his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) back to his childhood home for a little vacation out of sentimental reasons and to smooth over a strained relationship with the family. Yet they don’t even make it to the house before they encounter this same creature.
This and everything that happens after in terms of Blake being attacked and evolving into a Wolf Man himself takes place over a single night -just a few hours even. Where Whannell had built out gradual tension in his prior film through mystery and character building, it’s considerably dampened in this film. Ostensibly rendering Blake more susceptible to the Wolf Man’s attack is his apparent rage issues, something inherited from his father. And yet in the fairly short time we get to know him as a character before the transformation takes root, there isn’t a lot of evidence to support this assertion. We seem him justifiably angry with his daughter for a very reckless act near heavy traffic, but an anger that doesn’t rise to any shouting, vitriol, or violence. And an argument with his wife, though more arbitrary, is terse but civil -Ginger interrupts them before it can devolve. And through such sequences, Abbott barely hints at any kind of suppressed emotions or violent tendencies. Whannell clearly has The Shining in mind for the descent of the patriarch of this small family while in an isolated location, and yet he keeps the signs of any ill behaviour out of sight -not that it matters much for him becoming a Wolf-Man, just as contrivance for details of plot.
Abbott does not particularly impress or stand out in any significant way for the lead of this film. He’s exasperatingly dull before he begins turning and pretty uninspired afterwards. In fact his performance reflects poorly on Whannell, as I wonder retroactively how much of The Invisible Man being good depended on Elisabeth Moss’s extraordinarily intense and focused acting. It probably is unfair, because the set-up here is just that much more bland, reflecting its new modern context in no discernible way and structuring the film along the easiest horror guidelines. Not only would it lose nothing set in its original time period but it’s got virtually nothing to say, as what few gestures at humanity it makes on behalf of Blake are dropped the more werewolf he becomes. For a little bit he still wants to protect his family and even at his worst the movie plays the inner humanity card, but there’s nothing else. An empty redemption that only de-fangs the movie further.
The effects of the Wolf Man are pretty good though -quite different from usual werewolf movies, if far less tangible than in the classics. Whannell seemed to go in with the approach that the figure is equal parts wolf and man, and the resulting homunculus has a look all its own -even if it veers into hog a little bit. And the one really interesting feature that Whannell doesn’t explore nearly as much as he should, is a “wolf vision” that begins to consume Blake from the moment he is infected. We see a few instances, where the camera pans from Charlotte or Ginger’s perspective into his own, and the world becomes more vague and hazy -not unlike the heat vision from Predator movies, but more alien, with distorted features on the people he sees and bright glowing eyes. It sets up a barrier of communication and familiarity, but I wish that Whannell used it’s implication to explore his character’s transforming mindset more, rather than just bringing it up as a cool visual technique.
Scary on a mere surface level, there's no thought put into the horror as well -even as that aforementioned subjectivity raises some existential chills, or would if applied better. But Whannell is content with meagre effects and mild shocks as the backbone of the horror -things like the Wolf' Man's appearance alone and the threat of violence that we know is not going to come to Charlotte and Ginger. Any suspense is muted for this and if you've seen the trailer you've seen the only marginally effective jump scare too. The film is not shot with much grace or detail -the imagery dreary and dull, not helped by the bulk of the film being set over a pale night. Morning does come at the end, and there's a nice shot of the open scenery that proves competence wasn't a factor -Whannell or Blumhouse chose for it to be this dour.
Squandering what snippets of sharp ideas its concept had, The Wolf Man may be one of the better recent tragedies of what could have been. Maybe it was always going to be this bland, but I'm doubtful. This track of Blumhouse reinventing monster movies, probably directly through Whannell, is not going to end soon -there's probably some dim version of The Mummy on the horizon. Though the wind is firmly out of its sails.
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