Lycanthropy is not for the faint of heart. Bloody lacerations appear, seemingly out of nowhere, on arms and legs. Teeth tumble from mouths like dew from plants. Toenails detach themselves from their appendages, the useless flotsam of a metamorphosis in progress. Bones wriggle and readjust with the curdling cracks of a nightmare visit to the chiropractor.
It’s been a good 20 years since I’ve seen 1941’s original The Wolf Man, but I scarcely recall its horrors manifesting with such gruesome tactility as its new Blumhouse remake, Wolf Man. Unshackled from the censorious Hays Code, co-director Leigh Wannell wants you to feel the agony — emotional as well as physical — of the title character’s mutation. It is painful to watch, just as it is painful for Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott), a loving husband and father, to acquiesce his humanity, vestige by vestige, through one wolfen gradation after another. Wolf Man is undoubtedly a marvel of makeup, but it’s the tragic inevitability of its character progression that will stick with me the most.
We first encounter Blake as a child, reared by a strict militarist father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), in the Oregon wilderness circa 1995. While on a hunting excursion, they encounter their first run-in with a hirsute bipedal creature that, in the classic cryptozoological tradition, seems to vanish as quickly as it appears, manifesting as little more than a fuzzy humanoid in a rifle scope. This prologue introduces a theme that will ripple into the main storyline of Wolf Man: Grady’s obsession to protect his son from danger forms its own crippling vise over Blake’s consciousness, prompting us to question whom is the real threat — the nebulous being in the woods, or the controlling monster in the next room?
Thirty years later, in an unnamed American city, Blake is an unemployed writer and stay-at-home dad to daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), with whom he shares a tender bond, amplified by perhaps a little of his father’s overprotectionist tendencies. While Wolf Man is not a political film per se, its men seem to perceive threats around every corner, urban and rural alike, exhibiting the paranoia over crime that’s common among today’s ideological right; whether the movie critiques or placates this perspective is debatable. But there is a subtext of emasculation in Blake’s domestic life, as he tends to the roost while his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), a workaholic journalist, serves as the family’s breadwinner, a power dynamic that has allowed inequities and resentments in their marriage to fester.
And so, when Blake receives a letter that his long-estranged father has been presumed deceased, he proposes a family trip to the Oregon farmhouse in which he was raised as an opportunity to reboot his floundering union with Charlotte. It’s there that the trouble begins. Testing the survivalist mettle of cloistered cosmopolitans is a durable trope in backwoods horror, and Wolf Man is no exception. Moments from locating Grady’s property, their van is destroyed and their belongings are gone, while the howls and skittering footfalls of a werewolf — supplemented by composer Benjamin Wallfish’s tense, intestinal score — exhibit an omnipresent menace.
Though director Wannell (who also helmed another respected Universal horror remake, 2020’s The Invisible Man) isn’t afraid to go graphic, the first half of Wolf Man is an exercise in restraint. In the classic tradition of, say, the Val Lewton creature features, he recognizes that fear metastasizes through the withholding of information. For nearly the entire film, in fact, we don’t see the face of the wolf man; it’s only after Blake becomes infected, en route to becoming a wolf man himself, that Wannell caters to his gorier instincts.
But even then, we never lose touch with the character’s Homo sapiens core. Rendered feral and almost mute for nearly half the picture, Christopher Abbott brilliantly captures Blake’s silent struggle to thwart the disease and maintain his humanity, even as his body reconfigures itself, and his comprehension for sight and sound transform along with it. It’s in the eyes somewhere, or the halting movements; he’s still there, aching to get out. He may be a wolf man, but that doesn’t mean he’s a monster.
WOLF MAN. Director: Leigh Wannell; Distributor: Universal; Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Ben Prendergast; Opens Friday at most area theaters