Wolf Man-Leigh Whannel’s New Take on the Werewolf That Only Sort of Works

With Wolf Man, Leigh Whannell attempts to do what he did with The Invisible Man: take a Universal Monster Movie character and use it as a more profound allegory relevant to the modern day. In the case of The Invisible Man, he took the titular character and made him an allegory for contemporary forms of domestic abuse and gaslighting. With Wolf Man, there's an attempt here to use it as an allegory for generational trauma, using the disease that transforms the protagonist into the titular character as a way to say something about how trauma and abuse get passed on from generation to generation or something along those lines. 

For an allegory like that to be impactful, though, you need to be able to connect with the characters beyond those ideas. And unfortunately, the film doesn't do much to flesh out these characters beyond that central allegory, mainly using them as a mouthpiece for the themes and ideas. The writing could also be pretty unsubtle, making its central allegory less impactful.

Whannell also attempts a contemporary spin on the titular character by turning it into a tragic body horror narrative. And it's this part of the film where I found it to be at its best. Compared to previous takes on the titular character, there's much more emphasis on the protagonist's body slowly morphing and changing. The camerawork, which locks the camera onto the protagonist's body or pans around to represent the perspective changes caused by his transformation, works incredibly well to sell that transformation. There's also a particular emphasis on sound design to sell the transformation, with some creative sequences where the protagonist hears the sound of a spider crawling as loud thumps or his family speaking as total gibberish.

But even then, the body horror only works slightly. For a body horror narrative like the one the film attempts to work, you need to feel that the central characters have genuine love and affection towards each other so that the central transformation feels genuinely tragic. Here, despite the characters saying they love each other, there's a general coldness to their interactions, so the attempted tragedy of the story doesn't feel as impactful. It makes the final moments, where the film reaches the expected tragic conclusion, come at a slight whimper, as it isn't as impactful as it should be since it occurred to characters who I struggled to connect to and who I felt the film struggled to feel like a genuinely loving family.

Wolf Man is Now Playing in theaters in the U.S