Wolf Man

When Wolf Man came out in theaters, I was fairly underwhelmed by what was put out in the trailer and the makeshift “dark universe” that Universal tried to revive initially with Tom Cruise in “The Mummy”. I wanted that movie to be good. I thought a modern day Universal Monster Universe of movies could be good. Revisit the classics that have been perennial Halloween staples but put a modern twist on them. The only problem is apparently they just want to do pretty much the worst version of that for everything they’ve done. The Mummy was trash. I don’t want to put that solely on Sofia Boutella but honestly I’ve never been a big fan. Not that Cruise was remarkable in that movie. But it was poorly executed all the way around. The Invisible Man was the last movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic back in 2020. It wasn’t much better. I appreciated that they tried to make it more of a psychological thriller. Again, Elizabeth Moss just couldn’t carry it for me. Not that it was otherwise remarkable. It just didn’t really do anything interesting. She was fine in it. It was just ok at best. So when Wolf Man came down the pike and the trailer was incredibly forgettable with a cast I couldn’t care less about, my initial motivation was none. Not even a little bit. I couldn’t tell you when it hit streaming because I wasn’t waiting for that chance to test out the waters either. So we’ve established I’m someone with a werewolf proclivity, a tolerance for crappy horror movies, a theater subscription service as well as a number of streaming platforms and a penchant for physical media. All of that out there in the open and I had zero desire to see this movie in any form or fashion. So now that I’ve watched it, was I right or did this Halloween challenge right a wrong I had been too hasty in assuming previously?

I was right. I know. I could have drawn that out a little more. And I’m probably being a little bit reductionist because there are things about the film that I appreciated that I wouldn’t have known about had I never watched it. But at the end of the day, this movie was just ok at best. There wasn’t anything in it that moved the needle or really convinced me that my initial assessment had been off in any way. If anything, most of the things I assumed about this movie were really pretty correct. So I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that this movie just sort of was. It got the reception I think it deserved which is that some people saw it and of those people, some of them were ok with it. Not a scathing review but certainly not something all that complementary either. So lets see what Wolf Man did right before I just tear it to shreds. Which is what a werewolf would do. See what I did there?

First lets handle just the devolution of our main character. I want to say his name was Mark, maybe? He seems like a Mark and honestly I just don’t have it in me to go look it up right now. So, not giving anything away here because it’s all in the trailer, Mark gets scratched by a werewolf and begins turning into one. While it’s VERY subtly in my opinion, it’s still pronounced enough to understand it’s a transformation. He’s still mostly human just with some wolflike traits. I liked that they did much of it practically. I think it was done relatively well. That slow burn of a principle character transforming into something much darker that will eventually pose as a threat to the rest of the protagonists of the film is a well worn trope in many horror movies. It’s featured heavily in the zombie genre. Somebody gets bit and while they’re still mostly human, we hang on to that part of them but typically it goes just a little too long and once they turn, that emotional connection is hard to sever and usually ends up causing some chaos. What I appreciate that they were deliberate at with this film was in his transformation being minimalist in incremental fashion, it prolongs that sense of mounting tension. So this was executed well. It gave his wife, her name was probably Emily, she definitely seemed like an Emily to me, a much stronger connection to him but also the ability to be truly horrified as his transformation continued to take root. She was trying to salvage what she could while still being genuinely terrified of not only her husband, but what she knew was coming as things continued to spiral.

The second part of this transformation was the other piece that I really enjoyed in this movie. There was a tangible breakdown between Mark and Emily. It was to the point that they could no longer understand each other. As he tried to communicate, it was not in English words but grunts and noises. BUT they spun things around and gave us the other half of this process where Mark is losing his humanity and he’s still conscious of his surroundings but he’s trapped in his own head. His narration is wonderful here as he’s clearly still himself within himself. But on the outside he is cut off from his family. I know from reading the trivia about this movie that part of the inspiration for this was an impact of the pandemic. The sense of being isolated in that right while trying to maintain sanity and humanity was maddening at times. So the source material on that checks out. Stylistically, the means by which they achieve this effect is also really nice. When we see through Mark’s eyes (and yes, I’m fully committing to Mark and Emily, just an FYI for you) the hue on the screen is different. We are clearly being given a glimpse from his point of view. When he sees Emily or his daughter, probably Agnes, that seems right too, they don’t look totally normal. The color palate is no longer any measure of vibrant but is assimilating into singular variations on primary reds and blues with elements of their persons being obscured or seen differently. When you combine this with the practical effects they performed on the exterior of Mark, the marriage of these two elements on screen does add a deftness of hand to the presentation of the transformation he’s undergoing from human to beast.

Unfortunately that’s about all the credibility I can lend them at this point. Everything else on the film is generally boring and pointless. We are given a brief backstory of Mark as a boy which helps correlate some of the visuals of where the movie takes place. There is a bookend between a particular vista that is fairly nice but creatively I don’t think it’s quite the powerhouse moment Whannel was hoping for in the end. I didn’t mind it but it also didn’t move me in any way. It just sort of was and I recognized the intent but nothing more from it. The acting was fair. I’ll give them that but none of them were terribly dimensional in who they were. Mark was incredibly flat as a character, both as a boy and an adult. Emily was reasonably ok as someone terrified of their husband turning into a wolf person but again, not a likable protagonist in any way. If I had to give her credibility I’d say she was not overtly annoying. But I don’t know if simply the absence of negative is necessarily a positive. I’d rather notate that she surprised me and really popped on screen. She took charge and protected her daughter well. Which, to be fair, she did do a few times. But it’s a far cry from some of the other final girls I’ve come to appreciate in things like You’re Next. Under duress, it would be nice to see more of her own competing primal instincts come out as a means of protection against predators. I think by trying to mitigate Mark’s clinging to humanity despite the overwhelming nature of his physical and mental conversion they presented a situation where she could linger in a sort of safety that wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t tremendously pronounced but it was there enough to feel a little lazy instead of inspired. But that’s just my take on it.

Ultimately this movie just felt boring. That’s the problem. It was what I got from the trailer. None of the people seemed interesting even in the 2 minutes I had in commercial format. That’s why there was no draw to this. It’s like watching people from a sears catalog go on vacation and it turns out poorly but they keep being people from a sears catalog so there just no real expression. It’s similar to The Wolf of Snow Hollow but in a slightly different direction. This tries to marry drama and horror in a way that is compelling but they don’t really do either well. The idea of the wolf person is set against the backdrop of Oregonian woods and Native American folklore. But it’s never really explained anymore than a few on screen words at the very beginning of the movie. Coupled with a very basic set up of Mark as a boy with his overbearing father going hunting in the woods, the horror element is fairly neutered. I think it piggybacks on the general idea of a familiar person transforming into a threat which can be used allegorically in many ways if you want to tell the story through that lens. But that’s not present. Mark is a boring person. It seems like he might have sort of rebelled slightly against his father’s overbearing nature to be a more loving and compassionate dad but that’s not really nailed down. The ambiguity seems to imply that he’s unknowable in that way to a degree. Which could be a reasonable deflection if he was likable. He’s not. He truly just exits. You look at him and he’s boring. Even his relationship with his daughter feels more manufactured than natural. They also plant seeds of doubt in the marriage which tries to be a means by which there could be a redemptive arc to the story. But that’s also just flat and uninteresting. We get notes of the idea of a story told with interesting intent but too much vagueness surrounds it. The movie is fogged by nothingness and it makes it all feel really flat. Even the revelation moments are stark and inconsequential. In the end the movie just stops being and we’re happy it’s over. It feels empty in that respect.

I think because of all this, I have to place this movie in the 4’s. It’s put together well and there was good intention. Leigh Whannel has carved out a relatively solid niche for himself in the horror genre but I don’t know that I’ve ever found him to be genuinely compelling in his execution. He’s played characters well. He’s got a great manic energy that presents humorously against the backdrop of peril and fear in the Insidious franchise. That was done well. He and Cary Elwes work nicely together in the first Saw film. I know he’s created other vehicles as well and has been measurably successful at times. I just don’t think he fits the bill of a John Carpenter or a Wes Craven. I know he’d love to live up to those names, and even those guys had flicks that weren’t great. They had a few notable films but they also had a number of real pieces of garbage as well. Nobody wins them all. But for Whannel in this one, it’s far from a win. I think I need to place it firmly at a 4. It’s still better than some of the really terrible movies I’ve seen. I’ll still pull out that measuring stick of 28 Years Later and I’d rather sit through the bore-fest of Wolf Man a second time than trudge through 28 seconds of that movie. So a 4 seems fair. It’s definitely not one to own. While I’m a fan of werewolf movies, I don’t consider myself an afficionado by any means so this might be well liked and appreciated in that community. I hope it does have an audience. But I wasn’t it. I didn’t watch it initially for a reason and as I said before, I stood correct in that assumption. Just because I was curious, it was actually Blake and Charlotte. But to me they’ll always be Mark and Emily. And Agnes. But I didn’t really like her so that’s why she gets a deliberately bad name. Not a bad kid. Just a boring movie and she didn’t help it. And she was annoying enough of a character to be named Agnes. I didn’t look her actual name up for the movie though. And I’m not going to. So until next time kids, I’ll catch you on the flip side.