If you loved David Cronenberg’s brilliant and twisted and memorably disgusting body-horror re-imagining of “The Fly,” you’ll probably dig what director and co-writer Leigh Whannell does with “Wolf Man.” Just as Whannell breathed new life into the story of “The Invisible Man” in 2020, he offers a fresh and grotesquely chilling take on the well-trodden storyline of the man who becomes … something else.
In an extended prologue set in rural Oregon some 30 years ago (with New Zealand as the stand-in filming location), a young boy named Blake Lovell (played by Zac Chandler) lives in a sylvan mountain farmhouse with his father Grady (Sam Jaeger), a war veteran who treats Blake more like a private in boot camp than a son, e.g., telling him they’re heading out to hunt at “oh seven hundred.” Grady has been hardened by the death of Blake’s mother, and he’s constantly lecturing Blake about survival and telling him you can be taken from this world in the blink of an eye. Grady is also obsessed with a near-mythical creature living in the woods — a supposed combination of man and beast.
Flash forward to present day San Francisco, where Blake (now played by Christopher Abbott) is a writer and stay-at-home dad whose wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), a career-oriented journalist, takes a back seat when it comes to parenting their 8-year-old daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), who clearly prefers spending time with her father. When Blake receives word that his estranged father who went missing a long time ago has legally been declared dead, he sells Charlotte on a plan for them to spend the summer at the house in the Oregon wilderness. It will be good for their struggling marriage!
That’s a classic example of the “Come on, man!” plot development that occurs in even the best horror movies. Why would Blake want to return to the remote and dusty and dank house of his childhood, where he experienced so much trauma that he stopped speaking with his father? What the heck is Ginger supposed to do all summer, with nobody else around? Wouldn’t it make more sense to take a lovely drive and spend some time a few hours north of the city, in a bright and warm and welcoming vacation destination? Come on, man!
ANYWAY. Blake and family get lost on the dark and winding roads before they can even find the farmhouse, and of course there’s no cell phone service, and without revealing too many details, let’s just say that by the time they finally get to the property, some sort of shadowy, growling predator has attacked them, and Blake has sustained quite the nasty wound on his arm. It almost looks like … is that … a bite mark? (By this point, we’ve only had the briefest glimpses of the woodland creature. Director Whannell and cinematographer Stefan Duscio make great use of whirling camera moves and quick cuts to heighten the terror without showing it — until much later on.)
Blake quickly develops a heightened sense of smell (uh-oh), and then the physical transformation begins. He loses the ability to speak, there’s some gnarly stuff going on with that arm, his face literally changes shape — and soon Charlotte must determine if the greater threat is the predator lurking outside, or her husband, who is rapidly turning into a monster.
There’s a lot of bouncing back and forth between the farmhouse and the barn and the obligatory Rickety Old Pickup Truck with a Dead Battery; at times it’s reminiscent of that insurance commercial with the chainsaw killer, where the teenagers keep making bad decisions. Of course, there are jump scares along the way, some more effective than others.
“Wolf Man” has a kind of 1980s horror movie vibe in that Blake’s transformation is achieved primarily through prosthetics. There’s also a rather cheesy but effectively chilling use of “Wolf Man Vision,” where we see Charlotte and Ginger through Blake’s eyes. It’s truly creepy — and it reminds us that Blake the father and husband and human being is dying a slow death and giving way to this creature, and he’s aware of it and can’t do anything about it. As always, the story of the Wolf Man is, at its core, a tragedy.