Sitting through Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man, I was reminded constantly of Philip Barkin's snarky, forthright poem "This Be the Verse." "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you," it reads, forewarning the dangers of procreation.
Whannell's film opens with a hunting excursion between father and son in the woods surrounding their Oregon farmhouse, cut short by a near-fatal encounter with a local legend, dubbed "Face of the Wolf" by the Indigenous Peoples of the region. Though the gruff, hectoring patriarch protects his kin from the immediate danger of this half-glimpsed monster, he fails to preserve the boy's sense of comfort and safety.
Flash forward thirty years and the grown-up Blake (Christopher Abbot) is doing everything he can not to infect his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) with the hereditary scars he received from his old man. "When I have kids, I'm never going to fight in front of them," the precocious young girl says to her parents in an early scene, just to drive the point home.
Drive home is exactly what Blake, Ginger and workaholic mother Charlotte (Julia Garner) do when Blake's long-missing father is finally pronounced dead, taking a hiatus from their big-city life as they retreat to the backwoods. Before they even reach the farm, the titular creature attacks their truck, and by the time they barricade themselves inside, a wounded Blake already begins to show symptoms of encroaching wolfdom.
After a string of disastrously overblown attempts at cashing in on Universal Pictures' extensive creature-feature IP, Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck have saddled their reboot with an admirable conceit. Narrowing the focus of a well-worn story down to the experience of one family, in one location, over the course of one fateful night, Wolf Man seeks to combine a sense of old school, "real-time" suspense with the heightened emotional stakes of a domestic drama. Unfortunately, it fails at both, spreading thin its meagre insights on trauma and transference across 100 minutes' worth of repetitive set pieces –– the characters are locked into a night that refuses to end, and the same can be said of the audience.
The all-encompassing darkness of Whannell's aesthetic quite literally engulfs his competent, workmanlike direction; the film is so dingily and murkily lit, it renders his style almost illegible. Though it's a clear attempt to align the audience with the experience of its fumbling, disoriented characters, the sequences that evoke Blake's transforming point of view by contrast — cranking the brightness and washing the scenery in a digital cyanic haze — only serve as a frustrating reminder of what's being concealed from our view.
The camera transitions between these modes of sight with fluid, rotating movements that also herald shifts in aural perception. A bewildered, worrying Charlotte tearfully tells her husband how much she loves him, but the sound of her voice becomes scrambled beyond recognition as we occupy Blake's lupine sensory plane. A potentially gutting way to unravel a tight-knit group (which the actors sell as best they can), Wolf Man's decision to place the couple in conflict from the get-go reduces it to a literal manifestation of their larger struggle to communicate.
To make matters worse, Whannell and Tuck undercut the sincerity of their connection by prioritizing that of father and daughter, whose quirky motif of "mind-reading" overpowers this barrier and comes screechingly full circle. Blake's devotion as a parent is never really contested, only his ability to stave off animal nature. Even as he chases his wife and child around the house, the possibility that he might actually hurt them never truly exists. Robbed of both material and psychological stakes, the film leaves little to do than wait for the expected pieces to click together.
Wolf Man's perfunctory setups for obvious payoffs are emblematic of its hollow centre, void of originality and tension but surrounded on all sides by gestures toward suspense and characterization — a sheep in wolf's clothing.