With All That's Going On in the World, Who Cares What I Thought Of Wolf Man?

I thought it sucks, incidentally

I have spent between three to ten years researching and writing The Fractured Mirror, my epic upcoming book about the history of American movies about filmmaking.

The column began at TCM Backlot in May, 2015, not long after I was laid off from The Dissolve. TCM Backlot ended in 2021 but my wonderful editor Yacov Freedman gave me permission to run the pieces that I had written for TCM Backlot on my site and turn them into a book.

That was three and a half years ago. In May of 2022, I launched the Kickstarter campaign for The Fractured Mirror. I gave myself more time than usual to finish the book. Instead of six to nine months, I gave myself a year and a half to finish.

I wanted to have the book available for purchase for the 2023 holiday season. That seemed like a reasonable deadline.

I thought that I’d have to watch and write about three hundred movies for the book. That’s a lot of movies! That’s a lot of work! That’s a lot of time! That’s a lot of effort.

As is often the case, I was wrong! I vastly underestimated the amount of work involved.

Instead of three hundred movies, the book will cover close to five hundred movies. I missed the 2023 and 2024 Christmas seasons. I’m hoping to have it available for purchase in late February or March.

It involves SO MUCH WORK! An INSANE amount of work! I am SO CLOSE!

I keep churning out draft after draft in a furious fever to finally finish my beast of a book.

I just finished my seventh draft of a five hundred page magnum opus.

I am more than committed. I am obsessed. I’ve done so much work on the book. It’s so good. I just need to finish it and share it with the world so that I can finally reap the rewards of my labor.

When you’re hyper-focused on an important task like finishing a massive book covering a solid century of Hollywood history it can be hard to work on anything else.

That is particularly true when the work involved is as forgettable as Wolf Man. It’s a real nothing burger of a movie. It’s the kind of thing I need to write about it before it disappears completely from my mind.

Wolf Man opens in 1995. Protagonist Blake Lovell (Zac Chandler) is a child who encounters a mysterious creature hunting alongside his authoritarian father.

The film’s title is a giveaway as to the nature of the beast in question. It would be a wonderful excercise in misdirection if the monster in the prologue was a mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, Bigfoot or Merman who never showed up again, but it’s instead a werewolf.

We then skip ahead three decades. Blake is now a middle aged husband and father played by Christopher Abbott. When he receives news of his own father’s death, Blake returns to his childhood home in the woods alongside wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth).

Blake wants to work on his troubled relationship with his work-obsessed wife but he’s haunted by his past and dark lineage when they encounter Derek (Ben Prendergast), a local who remembers Blake although Derek does not remember him.

The family encounters a werewolf that scratches Blake and dissapears with Derek. The terrified patriarch manages to get his family to his home but his encounter with the lycathrope has changed him.

A sickness sweeps over Blake. He sweats profusely. Teeth fall out of his mouth. His skin begins to look sickly. It becomes evident to us doofuses in the audience, if not to Blake, that he has come down with an incurable case of Werewolfitis. That’s a disease that transforms human beings into terrifying half-wolf, half-man monsters.

Wolf Man is a post-COVID werewolf movie that unsuccessfully exploits our culture-wide fear of pandemics and viruses. Werewolf movies have traditionally portrayed werewolves as suffering from a highly infectious disease. Leigh Wannell’s fright flick portrays it as a virus with the potential to destroy lives, like COVID but real and dangerous.

This violently unnecessary reboot sees Blake’s transformation from neurotic human being to violent, destructive creature of pure id as a form of body horror.

Our hero/anti-hero/villain begins the movie a troubled man. He grows less human and more wolf-like with each successive scene after his unfortunate run-in with a hairy beast.

Blake spends much of the film in an in-between state between human and werewolf. For much of the proceedings, he’s still recognizably human but there’s nevertheless something deeply wrong with him that they don’t cover in medical school.

I am generally a fan of horror movies that traffic in atmosphere and suggestion rather than relying on the violence and gore. For example, I adored Nosferatu in large part because it went easy on bloodshed in favor of mood but that strategy does not work here.

What we don’t see is often as scary as what’s onscreen. Wolf Man illustrates a level of restraint that’s admidable in theory but deadly in presence.

I may be a highbrow film critic whose wit has been heralded in The New Yorker and The New York Times (seriously! You’d never guess from my writing, but I’ve actually accomplished a great deal during my forty-eight years on the planet!) who appreciates artistry and understatement but I’m also a horror hound who likes looking at cool-looking werewolves.

Wolf Man is all about understatement. It is fatally lacking in cool-looking werewolves. Transformation scenes are the money shots in werewolf movies. There’s just something about seeing an actor turn into an inhuman beast that appeals to the kid in us all. That’s why movies like The Howling are held in such high esteem.

Wolf Man doesn’t have any standout transformation scenes because Blake takes forever to become a werewolf. Blake’s daughter and wife are in the unenviable position of having to deal with multiple werewolves/threats, one internal and one external.

They’re confonted with a werewolf that will do anything to get into the house and hunt. Even more terrifyingly, they have to deal with a monster who is also their father, someone with a sacred duty to protect them but who turned into something they don’t recognize or understand.

Wolf Man is a minimalist endeavor with only a handful of characters. Despite fine performances, particularly from Garner, we don’t know these characters well enough to be invested in their survival. The film is short on gore but also characterization.

Whannell’s muddled monster movie isn’t scary or fun.

In that respect, it’s very different from Werewolves, which subscribed to the radical notion that werewolf movies should be goofy and silly and enjoyable, not grim and joyless.

Wolf Man is artier than I anticipated but that ends up working against it. It’s a real dog, a movie that I have already mostly forgotten just a few days after seeing it.

One and a half stars out of five