Director – Leigh Whannell, Screenplay – Corbett Tuck & Leigh Whannell, Producer – Jason Blum, Photography – Stefan Duscio, Music – Benjamin Wallfisch, Visual Effects – Bot VFX Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Stuart White) & Stargate Studios, Special Effects Supervisor – Steve Ingram, Makeup Effects – Arjen LLC (Designer – Arjen Tuiten), Production Design – Ruby Mathers. Production Company – Blumhouse/Cloak & Co..
Cast
Christopher Abbott (Blake Lovell), Julia Garner (Charlotte Lovell), Matilda Firth (Ginger Lovell), Sam Jaeger (Grady Lovell), Zac Chandler (Young Zac), Benedict Hardie (Derek Kiel), Ben Prendergast (Grady Wolf)
Plot
Writer Blake Lovell receives notification that his father Grady, who disappeared some years ago, has been declared legally dead. Blake rents a moving truck and drives up to North Oregon to clear out his father’s cabin, along with his wife Charlotte and their young daughter Ginger. However, something appears ahead of them, causing them to skid off the road and crash. A creature appears and attacks Blake before dragging away a local. Making their way on to the cabin, Blake becomes increasingly more ill and starts undergoing a physical transformation. Meanwhile, the creature is lurking to attack again.
Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941) was not the first film made about Werewolves. However, it was the one that set what has been accepted as the mythology of the genre about silver bullets and full moons in place. Lon Chaney Jr became a star as a result and his Larry Talbot is regarded as one of the Famous Monsters. Unlike Universal’s other monsters, The Wolf Man did not get his own sequel but Chaney and Larry Talbot did appear in the first of Universal’s monster bashes with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) continuing through House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). There was no remake up until the not bad The Wolfman (2010) starring Benicio Del Toro, which reworked the basics with modern effects.
In 2014, Universal announced the Dark Universe, which was an attempt to compete with The MCU and create a shared universe using their Famous Monsters. A slate of films were announced, including Johnny Depp cast as The Invisible Man, Javier Bardem as the Frankenstein monster and Angelia Jolie as the Bride of Frankenstein. However, the two entries that we did get with Dracula Untold (2014) and The Mummy (2017) ended up being such stinkers that the entire franchise was canned. Leigh Whannell did go on to make The Invisible Man (2020), although it is not clear if this was a Dark Universe film. It is hard to tell if anybody still has any ongoing interest in the Dark Universe by the time of Wolf Man, although a Bride of Frankenstein and a Creature from the Black Lagoon films appear to still be active and on the books. That said, it is difficult to imagine any kind of crossover universe where Whannell’s Invisible Man and Wolf Man would meet.
Leigh Whannell first appeared as co-writer and co-star of Saw (2004). He and good friend James Wan then went on to make Dead Silence (2007), Insidious (2010) and Insidious Chapter 2 (2013) with Wan directing and Whannell co-writing and co-starring, with both executive producing the Saw sequels. Whannell also wrote Cooties (2014) and The Mule (2014) for others and has made a number of acting appearances in several films. Whannell made his directorial debut with Insidious Chapter 3 (2015) and then went on to make Upgrade (2018), a clever little A.I. film produced by Blumhouse, followed by The Invisible Man. Whannell and Blumhouse now reteam to tackle the Wolf Man.
Christopher Abbott, wife Julia Garner and daughter Matilda FirthJulia Garner tries to deal with Christopher Abbott’s transformation
As he did in The Invisible Man, Whannell’s habit is to take an existing Universal famous monster and throw out everything except the title and the nature of the monster. It is worth comparing Wolf Man to the two previous versions. Both of these others concern Larry/Lawrence Talbot who returns to his father’s estate in rural Wales. While walking back from a Gypsy camp, Larry is attacked by a werewolf and then proceeds to turn into one. In Whannell’s film, Larry Talbot is replaced by Christopher Abbott’s Blake Lovell who is going to visit his father’s rural cabin on Oregon as opposed to estate in Wales, while accompanied by his family, something Larry Talbot is not outfitted with. He is attacked and starts to undergo transformation. There are no Gypsies here, which may well be due to that that that is considered a racial caricature these days, but this also means there is nobody who gets to explain the transformation process. Indeed, other than the title and opening title card that mentions American Indian mythology that refers to the creature as ‘the face of the wolf’, there is nothing that indicates we are in the midst of a werewolf film. There are also none of the usual full moons or silver bullets we associate with the genre.
As with The Invisible Man, it can also be observed that Leigh Whannell likes to take his Famous Monster and strip everything else out to focus on a psychological approach. It may also be that this is due to Blumhouse and their preference for budgets that run to around $5 million (although a quick look reveals that Wolf Man had a budget that was around $25 million). The upshot of this means that Whannell has sought to cut back by avoiding the constant need for effects sequences.
In Whannell’s hands, the whole of the werewolf film is pared back to a man transforming into a monster as his family look on while they are in isolation at a cabin in the woods. The film was conceived and written by Whannell and his wife Corbett Tuck in the midst of Covid lockdown, so such a focus is no particular surprise – it is mentioned more than once by Julia Warner how “daddy is sick” and the lycanthropic bite is compared to an infection.
Whannell reduces lighting levels and keeps the focus as a psychological one. In fact, I think Wolf Man is much better at doing this than The Invisible Man was. I am not sure the cuts back and forward to illuminated wolf vision add much to the story. There is also no actual werewolf seen in the film until around the one-hour point – there are the creatures that attack in the prologue and later when the truck crashes, but these are so briefly glimpse you are never sure what is there. Christopher Abbott does not undergo any transformation until the 75-minute mark – he develops partial characteristic throughout but there is no An American Werewolf in London (1981) styled changeover until this point.
