
When it was released in early 2020, it was hard not to view Leigh Whannell’s reenvisioning of The Invisible Man as the anti-franchise picture. At a time when “shared cinematic universes” were all the rage, Invisible Man was steadfastly self-contained (not coincidentally, Universal’s attempt to create a “Dark Universe” of action pictures featuring their classic movie monsters had blown up on the runway three years earlier). Whannell’s Invisible Man dropped all but the name and core concept of the original film and novel, instead reimagining the character as a sociopathic tech CEO who uses an optic suit to stalk and gaslight his estranged wife. Coming on the heels of the #MeToo movement, Invisible Man was a horror movie of its time, and contained a career-best performance from Elizabeth Moss (to say nothing of one all-timer of a shock-scare). It also, blissfully, spent zero time laying groundwork for any future installments or spinoffs. In an age of Easter eggs and post-credits teasers, the closed ending of The Invisible Man felt like something of a miracle.
Of course, it was also a Hollywood tentpole picture, so it was perhaps inevitable that Universal and Blumhouse would attempt to recreate its success. Five years later, Whannell has again been tapped to craft a moody reinterpretation of a Universal monster classic. Whannell’s Wolf Man is, to be sure, a cut above the usual January Blumhouse release, but it is never great in the way that The Invisible Man was great– and it’s at its worst when it tries to be.
As he did with The Invisible Man, Whannell all but jettisons the story of the 1941 original, transplanting the action from a Welsh village to the forests of Oregon. Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) receives word that his father has been legally declared dead, and embarks with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) to the cabin where he was raised. Blake’s father, a survivalist type, had evidently gone missing some years earlier; the death certificate is a formality, but it still dredges up Blake’s conflicted feelings regarding his sometimes scary upbringing. I shouldn’t need to tell you that the elder Lovell’s disappearance may or may not have something to do with a local legend which the indigenous population knows as “The Face of the Wolf,” nor should I need to tell you that Blake and his family are immediately attacked by a mysterious, hairy creature. And I certainly don’t need to tell you that Blake sustains a wound in the attack, or that, as the night goes on, he becomes increasingly… canine.

Wolf Man is at its best when it’s finding new and inventive ways of presenting Blake’s transformation on screen. It begins with a heightening of the senses; Blake can smell a drawer full of jerky from two rooms away, and a spider crawling up the wall sounds like a Neil Peart drum solo. As his condition progresses, Whannell actually brings us inside his head to view the world as a werewolf sees it. Color is at once drained out and heightened; he can recognize his loved ones, but they look strange and monstrous, and their words come out a disturbing garble (I doubt this was Whannell’s intent, but I couldn’t help but think of this classic Far Side strip). In the film’s most rewarding conceit, Whannell flips us back and forth between Blake’s point of view and Charlotte’s, giving us a sort of real-time Rashomon in which one of the participants is, functionally, a giant dog.
Had this been the main hook of Wolf Man, it might have been something truly special. Unfortunately, the film can’t seem to quite decide what exactly it wants to be, and there’s some evidence of rewrites along the line (the one-bad-night framework would seem to be an ingenious workaround of the full moon problem which plagues most werewolf movies, for example, but it’s never established whether the wolves in this film are affected by the moon in the first place). Because The Invisible Man was primarily a social thriller, one senses that Whannell felt pressured to amplify the allegory here as well– in this case, the parental fear of hurting their children while trying to protect them. Unfortunately, generational trauma and lycanthropy don’t snap together quite as easily as domestic abuse and invisibility, and whenever the film cycles back to those obvious beats it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes. The whole thing smacks of trying to make fetch happen– which, in a film about a human dog, one would think would be easy.

It’s not for lack of trying on the actors’ parts, though. Abbott captures the haunted qualities of Lon Chaney, Jr. which made the original so affecting, a muted sadness which– I’m sorry, I truly am– can only be described as hangdog. The scenes between Blake and his daughter are genuinely sweet, and one feels for him as he realizes how little he can do to protect her from himself. Garner, for her part, gives great “you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me” face, and once again proves herself to be an able final-girl. Her character is a high-powered journalist at an unnamed legacy publication who mentions working on a book, and I wish the film had leaned into this aspect of her a little more; with a little tweaking, one can easily imagine her as a no-nonsense Lois Lane type, using the wits she’s honed in her profession to protect her against her werewolf spouse.
Which is the film’s problem in a nutshell: it presents a lot of good ideas, but can’t seem to decide which ones on which to focus. In trying too hard to recapture The Invisible Man, Wolf Man betrays the originality which made that film so refreshing. We know that Whannell knows how to have a bloody good time– he wrote the screenplay for Saw, after all– but here we find him oddly muted and constrained. There’s some good meat on this picture’s bones, but not quite enough for us to sink our claws into.
Wolf Man
2025
dir. Leigh Whannell
103 min.
Now playing @ Apple Cinemas, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs