Wolf Man review: Does the job, but don't expect anything groundbreaking

Now Whannell’s back, trying to work that same hoodoo on another Universal monster – the Wolf Man.

Once again he’s given the basic concept a major rethink, but this time around he’s not exactly dragged an idea kicking and screaming into the 2020s. A few FX aside, this feels like a time capsule from the ’80s, and not just because Julia Garner, the film’s scream queen, sports a hairdo straight off a Desperately Seeking Susan poster.

Wolf Man opens with young Blake Lovell being taught how to hunt in the mountains of Oregon by his permanently angry dad. Instead they narrowly avoid being mauled by creature that Blake’s dad seems convinced is a missing hiker who, according to local rumours, contracted a virus that turned him into a Wolf Man.

Thirty years later, Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a writer in the city, living with his journalist wife Charlotte (Garner) and their little girl, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Charlotte, we learn, is worried her high-power job means she’s a rubbish mother, while Blake gets to do all the parent/child bonding stuff (which is clearly supposed to be cute, but is actually a tad nauseating).

Then Blake, who’s long estranged from his father, learns that dad’s been declared dead, and he’s inherited the family farm. So Blake suggests travelling out to the old farmstead for a bit of family bonding time.

Bad move. Just as they’re approaching the farm, they’re attacked by a strange creature that bites Blake. Then things get really hairy…

Except, oddly, they don’t in a literal sense. Because this is possibly the first werewolf film in which the wolf man actually loses their hair when they transform. And that’s far from the biggest change made to the usual werewolf shtick.

Without going into detailed spoilers, Whannell has made this into a film about the transformation, in a similar way to David Cronenberg’s The Fly.

This is full-on body horror, with some suitably icky moments for connoisseurs of the sub-genre. There are also plenty of effective jump scares and a couple of extraordinarily creepy moments of tension, especially one shot that pans from the human perception of a scene to the wolf man’s perception of the scene.

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So in terms of nuts ’n’ bolts horror movie-making, Wolf Man is a decent enough effort, though the desaturated colour palette of "several shades of gloom" becomes almost a self-parody after a while.

But after The Invisible Man, it’s disappointing. The efforts to link the themes of parenthood to the transformation are limp, the characters are thin and irritating, and the plot runs out of steam around halfway through, after a major "revelation" that most of the audience will have guessed anyway.

There’s an attempt to make Charlotte a modern, kick-ass scream queen, but there’s little disguising she’s a tropey damsel-in-distress, not helped by the fact that Garner has one, mildly-annoyed expression for 95 per cent of the film.

And after reimagining lycanthropy as a virus – suggesting some Covid analogy, perhaps – the script goes absolutely nowhere with the idea.

Ultimately, it’s a cabin in the wood flick with a werewolf antagonist. On that level, it does the job. Just don’t expect anything particularly groundbreaking.

Wolf Man is now showing in UK cinemas.

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