Final Rating: 2/5
“Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them”
Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell, opens with footage of a wasp being swarmed by ants. It’s a striking image: a carnivore being completely overpowered by a determined group of smaller insects. A visible predator amongst prey, the wasp’s very existence marks it for death. A smarter–or perhaps luckier–predator would hide from its prey, picking them off to avoid the danger of the group.The film immediately cuts to text describing a hiker that had recently gone missing in the Oregon woods. The last people to see him say he’s gone crazy due to something called “Hills Fever.” The indigenous people call it “The Face of the Wolf.”
After the death of his father Grady, Blake Lovell (Cristopher Abbott) returns to Oregon to collect his things, alongside his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Before they can arrive, they’re ambushed by a shadowy creature that topples their truck and injures Blake. Though the Lovells narrowly manage to escape into Blake’s childhood home, Blake’s condition rapidly worsens. Before long, he loses the ability to speak or understand his family. His mannerisms become more aggressive as he struggles to maintain his grip on reality and begins to transform physically into…something else.
But Wolf Man is a story of a man transforming only on the surface. Whannel and co-writer Corbett Tuck posit that Blake doesn’t become dangerous as much as he is revealed to be so. Blake is portrayed early on as a stern father, the scenes of him and Ginger directly mirroring flashback scenes of Blake and his father. Ultimately, these are characters who put on a show of wanting the best for their child’s safety, but when pushed, quickly become aggressive. In their transformations into literal monsters, the pretense disappears but the aggression remains.
Blake’s transformation into the wolf man is mostly non-physical. While Abbot eventually dons heavy prosthetics, his worsening condition is initially depicted through perspective shifts, showing the change in how he sees the world. During conversations, the camera will occasionally move behind Blake, making way for harsh blues and reds as his surroundings blur. The sound design becomes frustratingly opaque, speech garbled with high and low pitches blown out. Over the course of hours, Blake’s world becomes one of strangers, with no mutual understanding between them. It’s hard to watch for a few minutes, but Blake doesn’t have the luxury of shifting back to the omnipotent perspective.
Wolf Man is partially a story about the fine line fathers walk between security for and alienation from their families. It’s partially a story about an irreversible transformation brought on by and ultimately contributing to a cycle of trauma. But the connection between the two is muddled in the messaging of the film. The aggression of the men in this film feels like a character flaw, but never one so pronounced that it ties into the striking image of the predator in the opening.
The cycle of trauma, as well, seems under baked. Blake is estranged from his father when he is pronounced dead. In the flashback showing Blake and Grady’s hunting trip, the father lashes out at his son when Blake–gun in hand in a forest with a monster on the loose–runs off alone. Grady yelling at his son is harsh, but never rises to the level of cruel or abusive. The same goes for Blake when he sternly lectures his daughter after she almost runs into the street.
There’s a direct line drawn from the fathers’ behaviour to their eventual metamorphoses, but is an imperfect parent truly monstrous? Even after his transformation into the wolf man, Blake’s priority is to protect a family he knows he can only harm.
Could the same be said of the wasp towards the ants?
By the third act of the film, Wolf Man is the story of a good wolf man versus a bad wolf man. The nuance of their familial issues is mostly sidelined. Logically, it follows from the events of the film, but it feels like a missed opportunity thematically.
Caught in the middle is Blake’s wife Charlotte, played by Garner in a performance that carries the entire emotional weight of the film. Like Blake, Charlotte is an imperfect parent, a workaholic who is neglectful rather than aggressive. After Blake’s injury, it falls to Charlotte to protect Ginger while seeing to Blake’s injuries. Charlotte has an enormous amount to do–first aid, parenting, worrying about her husband chewing his arm off, operating a ham radio–and no help, allowing her to stand out for nearly the entire movie.
Unfortunately, it gives Garner little in the way of interaction with other characters, her scenes with Abbott especially disappointing as each gives a great performance that necessarily avoids interaction with the other. It’s a testament to her ability as an actor that the Lovells’ relationship feels even a little loving, considering how little of the relationship makes it through the screenplay.
In addition to a director’s commentary, the Wolf Man Blu-Ray contains several behind-the-scenes featurettes highlighting technical personnel. To hear Whannel tell it, Wolf Man was a highly collaborative effort between all departments, with sound and makeup as integral to the creative process of the film as cinematography and script.
The featurettes go into great detail on the use of practical effects, a particularly great segment centred around makeup artist Arjen Tuiten and his excitement at being able to put his own spin on a classic monster. Tuiten details the monumental amount of work that went into creating prosthetics for all five phases of Blake’s transformation, inspiring a greater appreciation for the visuals of the titular monster as he does.
Through the featurettes, Whannel–along with Tuiten and other production staff–repeatedly emphasize how important it is that their version of the wolf man is afflicted less by a curse and more by a disease. The gradual transformation is reflected in the script, the makeup, the cinematography, and even the sound design. The effect in the finished film is certainly successful, but for all the technical prowess behind Blake’s transformation, it never resonates thematically.
I keep coming back to the wasp. The wasp owes nothing to the ants, seeks no connection with them, and has no relationship to them. The wasp never becomes a predator, nor is it revealed to be one. The wasp is self-evidently dangerous. After his affliction with lycanthropy, Blake’s gradual transformation into a predator erodes his humanity. But it is very much a transformation. Blake shares nothing with the wasp: he becomes dangerous, but he didn’t start that way. The predator that Blake becomes is entirely new. There’s no revelation, because the wolf man is not Blake.
Thank you to Universal Pictures and Mandy Kay Marketing for the Blu-Ray.
