‘Mommy, he wants this to be over...’
Universal’s Dark Universe concept has always felt cursed. The idea was to reboot the many movie monsters that the old studio still held the rights to but the disastrous performance of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy reboot was so catastrophic that the whole concept was shelved. Saw co-creator Leigh Whannell revived the idea with his excellent reimagining of The Invisible Man in 2020 and that eventually led to this latest reboot of Wolf Man. He shouldn’t have bothered…
Blake (Christopher Abbott) comes from a line of werewolves, not unlike Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf, but his inner lycanthrope remains dormant until he returns to his hometown with his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Trapped in the isolated Oregon mountain town, Charlotte and Ginger watch helplessly as their loving patriarch becomes more and more animalistic.
Wolf Man pulls from The Evil Dead and The Shining without ever coming close to emulating either movie. The one-setting location makes the film predictable and repetitive rather than innovative and, most frustratingly of all, the film suffers from that most modern cinematic disease of bad lighting. The film’s latter half takes place entirely in shadow, and while this makes for some striking images, it is mostly just exasperating. Whannell decides to reject the opportunity to add another iconic transformation scene to the ranks of classic werewolf movies and instead goes from a more gradual metamorphosis – more akin to a degenerative disease than to something supernatural. While this leads to some enjoyably gnarly body horror, and the best thing about the whole film is when we see the world through the eyes of the beast, this too also becomes repetitious by the end.
Wolf Man is yet another setback for the Dark Universe and for Whannell, who up until this point had only made bangers. Perhaps most striking of all is that this reboot isn’t even superior to Benicio Del Toro’s 2010 take on the character – a huge disappointment.
