Our cultural fascination with ‘00s nostalgia continues to manifest itself in strange ways. Sure, you already know that Gen Z kids have reclaimed Oakleys and baggy-ass camo pants, and all of your favorite sitcoms from that era are getting one-and-done streaming revivals – that’s all pretty obvious. Yet now it’s come for horror, with a retro-styled ethos masquerading as “elevated” once again beginning to inform big productions. That guiding light is, in fact, shame: There are certain horror films that, in their attempts to do something new with their source material, ultimately disavow the aspects of their genre forebears that make them what they are. They feel ashamed to be proper “monster movies,” a strange graft of trendy signifiers or modern cliches to a bare-bones ancestral framework. An old example would be the vampire zombies in Francis Lawerence’s I Am Legend, which shares little with their relatives, to say nothing of Richard Matheson’s intelligent society of bloodsuckers whose hatred curdles into fear when confronted with the Last Man on Earth, and a more modern one would be the Tom Cruise Mummy, which turned Imhotep into an MCU American Werewolf in London for whatever reason. It seems the Universal Monsters stable, at least the ones that can be seen, suffer from this affliction more than most. Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is one of those pictures, despite the director’s success at bringing The Invisible Man into the modern era.
As designed, Wolf Man resembles your modern-day infection/isolation thriller – think Cabin Fever if only one person got infected – then the deep-seated split-psyche nightmare that we tend to think of when imagining an on-screen werewolf. There is no regret following the sunrise, as this journey into semi-lycanthropy is a one-way trip; the “curse” is a bloodborne pathogen, which means standard ammunition will work just fine when the time comes to grab the rifle, and the infected are more likely to sport scar tissue than they are to sprout hair all over their body. The glimpse of the monster design shown at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights is more accurate than horror fans would have hoped – the werewolf’s final form more closely resembles a post-toxic waste Paul McCrane from Robocop than Lon Chaney, which is a spectacular failure of imagination even if it was what the production could afford. It’s as if, upon looking at all the stunning werewolf designs that have graced screens throughout the decades, Whannel and company decided not to compete, hoping that the novelty of that choice would be enough. It isn’t.
Worse are the sloppy thematics, which result from trying to pick and choose specifics from the original feature and copy-paste them into the generic single-location infection feature. Taking place over a single night instead of the months-long timeframe of the original, we still follow a family as they head to the father’s ancestral home – in this case, it’s the Lovells, who are a thoroughly modern family that has inherited a farm in Oregon and decided to leave the hustle and bustle of San Francisco for rural calm and quiet. Blake (Christopher Abbott) spent a spartan childhood in the forested valleys beneath the mountains, hunting deer with his traumatized father (Sam Jaeger), who believed that staying tough was the key to survival and that his sole responsibility was his child’s safety and not their comfort. Decades before the present, a young Blake saw something strange with his father – something that could gore a buck in mere seconds – which his father linked to the bizarre disappearance of a hiker sometime earlier and the strange transformation he (allegedly) underwent. His dad became obsessed, Blake severed contact as he grew up, and decades later, he’s become the opposite of his old man. He’s a stay-at-home dad to his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), easy to ply for ice cream after trips to the museum, who quickly apologizes when his temper boils over (even as his daughter does dumb shit on the street that could get her killed) and lives in service to his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), a successful journalist who became the breadwinner when Blake’s career as a writer went down in flames.
You can probably guess where this is going – toxic masculinity and such – and your bets will pay out. Once they arrive in their faux-U-Haul, a local (Benedict Hardie) does his best to make the family uncomfortable as he guides them down the dirt roads to the farm, issuing warnings about going out after sunset while steadily implying how fucked up their familial dynamic is (they aren’t tough and such), before the entire thing runs off of a cliff. This is literal: Blake swerves the truck to avoid hitting a man-shaped creature in the middle of the road, and they wind up hundreds of feet below, suspended sideways on some surprisingly sturdy branches. The yokel opens the door, falls 15 feet, and is immediately Wolf Man food, and Blake’s lucky to escape the encounter with only a scratch. Once they flee to the farmhouse, he realizes this is fucking super-rabies, suffering the first stages of his transformation: his senses become heightened, his teeth and nails begin falling out, and he slowly begins to lose his humanity. Charlotte and Ginger – who are alluded to having some problems communicating, though you wouldn’t tell it from Whannell’s writing — are suddenly forced to contend with two threats: the Wolf Man they know and the one that they don’t, who is stalking them like a fox outside of a hen house.
Abbott and Garner are both fantastic performers – each has committed themselves to strange projects in a near-rejection of popular success (though Garner is your next Silver Surfer in The Fantastic Four: First Steps) – but Whannell leans too hard on them to supply what his writing can’t. Their characters are thinly written, existing as unexplored archetypes more than personalities, and Blake’s slow descent from speech into a series of grunts and yowls means there’s only so much Abbott can do to get this across, especially when the make-up starts to come out (there’s not even a Brundlefly-style “lifting of the rifle” to imply that, despite how he looks, the man is still within the beast). Abbott is no stranger to this kind of work, having done an excellent job with Brandon Cronenberg’s cyberpunk body-horror Possessor several years ago. He’s at the mercy of Whannell’s vision of the simmering rage boiling beneath the archetypal stay-at-home dad, caught in a trap of nature and nurture that is wholly artificial and lacks complexity. Garner, meanwhile, mostly looks stunned throughout, a waste of her talents: she’s one of the patron saints of modern-day cinematic discomfort, and Whannel doesn’t utilize her skills to any decent end—it’s just vacuous, a gaping chasm in the script where a person should be.
“Empty” could be a good way to summarize the whole film. Coming near the end of the initial wave of Universal Monsters – The Phantom of the Opera would be the final standalone feature released before the array of sequels and Abbot and Costello riffs, but The Wolf-Man would be the last of what we think of as the pre-Black Lagoon part of the golden age – it was a revision of the earlier Werewolf of London, placing the action in Wales and adding a whole host of lovely details that enhanced the quality of the European werewolf fable, even as aspects of it have aged… poorly. The original’s transatlantic cultural and class dynamics are omitted in the first case and reversed for the second, which might have been interesting had Blake remained in control of his faculties. Yet the fear of id-based regression – where the primal nature of man is freed to his unconscious delight and conscious horror – is one in which there’s no release of dark passions, being as fundamentally boring as wood accents in a cream-colored room.
Joe Johnston’s sin in his 2010 remake was hewing too close to the original’s sensibility without any innovations in the 70-year interim between the features, and Whannell’s is that he pirouettes too far away from the familiar in favor of the formulae that made him a successful writer/director. It’s Saw with a muddled moral, Insidious without the focus on its central family, Upgrade without the wit or kinetic action, or Invisible Man without the horrifying depth. Such, I guess, is what happens when Ryan Gosling decides he’s Kenough and leaves your production for Greta Gerwig and subsequent Oscar nominations.