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Thursday, January 16, 2025

Review: WOLF MAN

 by Rob DiCristino

The Dark Universe lives!

It’s hard for those of us working outside of the entertainment industry to understand just how fickle and arduous the motion picture development process can be. Some projects are rushed into production to capitalize on a rising pop star or cultural phenomenon — the 2002 Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads, for example, or 2023’s befuddling Five Nights at Freddy’s. Other prestige projects need years of seasoning before they’re ready to mature into their final forms — take 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which had to be totally reimagined to accommodate Leonardo DiCaprio’s (correct and justified) character switch. And then there are the orphans. The leftovers. The players to be named later. These are the projects for whom auspicious beginnings have soured into regrets and recriminations, into finger-pointing and half-hearted excuse-making. You remember, of course, when Universal Pictures reintroduced their classic monsters with the Avengers-coded Dark Universe. You remember, of course, how that was all spoiled by Tom Cruise’s 2017 disaster, The Mummy.
“But hold on!,” you say, remembering the relative critical and commercial success of 2020’s The Invisible Man. “Isn’t that proof that Hollywood development executives are actually Very Smart and just need to put their trust in quality creative voices like low-budget horror maestro Leigh Whannell?” You would think so! Trouble is, those same executives are also grubby, star-fucking whores, so it should come as no suprise that Universal dropped Whannell as soon as Ryan Gosling and frequent collaborator Derek Cianfrance showed interest in a Wolf Man remake. Only after Gosling and company left the project in 2021 — “scheduling conflicts,” i.e. “Blumhouse wouldn’t pay them” — did Whannell and his partner Corbett Tuck re-enter the picture. Production on Wolf Man was further delayed by the 2023 SAG/WGA strikes, which left little time to get something coherent together by the fall of 2024. And so, more than ten years into its misbegotten development, Wolf Man is what’s left: A two-star monster thriller released in January, where Hollywood dreams to go die.

And even if everything I just wrote is libelous, rumor-mill bullshit, it’s still the most generous-possible explanation for Universal dumping the new film from the co-creator of Saw and Insidious, whose last project made almost $150 million on a $7 million budget (during COVID!) at the beginning of the new year. It certainly wasn’t for lack of inspiration, as Whannell and Tuck’s screenplay introduces a workable update to the ‘40 horror classic: Upon the death of his father (Sam Jaeger), big-city writer Blake (Christopher Abbott) returns to his childhood ranch in rural Oregon. Blake is eager to reconnect with his workaholic wife (Julia Garner as Charlotte) and spend quality time with their daughter (Matilda Firth as Ginger), but they’re barely off the highway before a mysterious monster — a wolf-man, if you will — lays siege to the property. Matters become worse when the monster scratches Blake, slowly turning the kind-hearted man into a vicious creature of the night. Trapped in the wilderness with no help coming, Charlotte and Ginger must fight to survive.
On paper, Wolf Man has more than enough going for it. Saw showed us that Whannell knows claustrophobic horror, and The Invisible Man demonstrated his firm grasp of character psychology. There are stretches of Wolf Man that take advantage of both, like a great sequence in which a tarantula’s thunderous steps demonstrate Blake’s supersonic hearing, or a later scene where Ginger’s love breaks through his scrambled “wolf vision.” As in The Invisible Man — which uses negative space to build tension — Whannell understands that less is more when it comes to the werewolf effects; the wolf is suggested long before he’s ever seen, with most of the close-ups coming during Blake’s own monstrous transformation. This is the right way to do it! 2025 audiences will never be impressed by makeup effects — especially these, which are admittedly unremarkable — but we’re far more likely to invest if we’re seeing the toll they’re taking on a face we’ve gotten to know. And with due respect to Christopher Abbott, the faster we dispense normie, pan-faced Blake, the better.
It’s these scattered bits of genuine pathos and creativity that make the rest of Whannell’s film so frustrating, though, as its flat storytelling and disastrous dialogue — characters are constantly freezing the movie in its tracks to stumble through the subtext of their actions — make its ninety minutes of running time feel like two hundred. They’re lazy mistakes that are frankly unlike Whannell, which might lead us to infer that his film was another victim of the dreaded January re-cut, a watering-down that studios often employ to milk easier money out of a genre project that’s growing too ponderous or complex (in their infinite wisdom, at least) for mainstream audiences to comprehend. I’m willing to bet there’s a more layered and interesting version of Wolf Man on the cutting room floor, or at least on pages stuffed into a drawer somewhere in the derelict Dark Universe offices. Either way, the released version is too dull to be memorable and too competent to be fascinating, another let-down for Universal Monsterheads still hoping for a worthy return to their favorite franchise.

Wolf Man hits U.S. theaters on Friday.

1 comment:

  1. The Dark Universe marketing campaign is still the funniest thing that happened in Hollywood. When i try to explain it to non-movie-business follower, they always look at me like i'm making it up.

    I'm a big fan of Invisible Man, so i'm very interested in Wolf Man.

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