Film Review — "Wolf Man"
The most meaningful day of my professional life was the day I shared a workplace with Leigh Whannell. He was on set to act, and I was there to clean up the blood of his victims between takes. In the seven years I worked in production, that one day was the closest I ever came to truly living the dream.
Picture it: a Cleveland ’burb, the 9th of November 2015. The sky was partly cloudy, and the air was brisk. The movie we were making was The Bye Bye Man. It was Day 6 of a 28-day shooting schedule; crew call was 8:18 AM. (I still have the call sheet.)
The plan was to shoot script scenes 1-6 (a sequence where Whannell’s character goes on a neighborhood killing spree with a shotgun) as a single, continuous, all-encompassing long take. Even though he was there to play a disturbed madman, Leigh Whannell was so low-key and pleasant the entire time. I know, I know—Breaking News: Actors Act. It was just so cool, seeing someone who was such a formative presence in my youth be such a humble guy in person.
Not many people get to have a Meet Your Heroes moment that goes well, but I did. But only if wordless head-nods at work count as meeting. And since I never mustered the courage to actually say anything real to him, Leigh Whannell has no clue that without him, I, the bushy-tailed set dresser from his only day on The Bye Bye Man, wouldn’t be who I am today. Really, it’s true.
It’s true because Saw is the movie that made me want to make movies. (People always think that’s funny, but I’m serious.) I’d always been big into movies, but when I watched Saw at 13, I became obsessed with the mechanics of filmmaking, the “how it’s made” of it all. Something just clicked. I could feel the pieces fitting together, see the calculation that went into every decision—on screen and on the page.
Since co-creating Saw, Whannell’s horror projects have only gotten bolder and more heartrending, especially since he moved into the director’s seat. In other words, the humble faux-maniac from the set of The Bye Bye Man is not merely a damn fine fellow—he’s a damn fine craftsman.
Whannell has a penchant for visual storytelling. These days, I brake for almost any director who actively embraces their camera’s range of motion. Whannell not only moves his camera to follow the action, but he also relies on it to capture states of mind. He likes to swivel or tilt the frame mid-movement to reveal a character’s disorientation and to try to elicit a similar feeling from the audience. In Wolf Man, the visuals often reflect the transmuting mind and body of Blake, played by Christopher Abbott.
Christopher Abbott is Wolf Man’s best asset. He is really up to the task of bringing nuance to Blake’s descent from sensitive father to savage beast, even when the film weighs him down. It starts with Abbott and Whannell establishing Blake early on as the nontoxic antithesis of the brutish dad who raised him. Sam Jaeger, who plays Blake’s domineering survivalist father Grady, shows us with only a few minutes of screen time exactly why Blake has been so determined to be Grady’s polar opposite as a father. I mean, would Grady have ever worn lipstick and made silly faces to amuse his child, as Blake does for his daughter Ginger? Unlikely! However, try as he might, Blake still has the occasional outburst of emotion, which we’re meant to read as his old scars rising up.
Those wounds reopen for real when a beastly ambush forces Blake to undergo a feverish, unstoppable mutation into a half-man/half-monster version of himself that has ostensibly been lying dormant in his genes for decades, figuratively speaking. That last part does rely upon some inference and a dash of projection, admittedly. Wolf Man doesn’t dig too deep in that direction (or in any direction, for that matter), but given that “the monster is actually generational trauma” is such a default mode these days, we don’t need a whole lot to get the gist. If Blake’s eruptions came from a darker place and led to genuine rage, instead of the perfectly rational parental alarm we’re shown, the trauma stuff may have translated better and made for more interesting conflict. (It’s like the movie insists on playing it safe. Boo!) Plus, it would’ve given Christopher Abbott another layer to weave in as he morphs.
For Wolf Man, Whannell adopts the “Seth Brundle” approach to transformation. I usually try to eschew comparisons to other films if I can avoid it, but Wolf Man is so clearly drawn from The Fly that I’d be remiss not to mention it. Christopher Abbott’s bodily deformation is very reminiscent of Jeff Goldblum’s in David Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror masterpiece. The inspiration isn’t subtle. But while Brundle’s metamorphosis occurs steadily over several days and comes with a few evolutionary benefits upfront, Blake’s happens in a night and has virtually no upside—it’s total decline. His human physiology breaks down in short order as his body succumbs to the infectious changes.
I’ll just say it… the special effects makeup is unremarkable and just plain bad, and the “creature” design leaves much to be desired. My guess is that the idea was to land on the sensible (??) side of fantastical in order to ground (??) the story and not hinder the performance. But that’s dumb. It’s also ugly, and not in a good way. First of all, why—I repeat, WHY—is Christopher Abbott’s hair falling out? Like, sorry to be a werewolf essentialist or whatever, but he is becoming a werewolf, yeah? Wolves are famously very furry animals, and wolf-men are famously very hairy dudes. So then why’s Christopher Abbott shedding, bro? If anything, his hair should thicken and lengthen, right?! Listen, horror-fantasy stories do not—I repeat, DO NOT—need to be gRoUNdEd iN reAliTy. It’s silly and doesn’t actually aid the actors in any significant way, not if they’re good. And don’t worry about suspending my disbelief, babes; I did that myself when I chose to watch a werewolf movie.
Another key filmic element hindering Abbott’s performance here? The lighting, mainly in the final thirty minutes. Thank goodness I saw this “in IMAX” at my local Nicole Kidman multiplex because if I’d watched this on my home television screen, I probably would’ve struggled more to discern what was unfolding. Under-lighting is common these days, and what we get here is nothing especially heinous, but it still sucks when a significant chunk of a film looks like it was shot through mud.
In stark contrast to the sludgy look of the film at large are the brief moments of WolfVision, which may be Whannell’s cleverest invention for this story. As Blake struggles to maintain a grip on the human world, he undergoes a seismic sensory shift. And to make sure the audience keeps his protagonist’s humanity in perspective, Whannell physically renders on screen Blake’s new frenetic means of processing what he sees and hears. Whannell smoothly oscillates between the “real” world and Blake’s with slow tracking shots in which colors and sounds gradually invert to the point of striking inscrutability and then gradually revert back to normal. These instances of WolfVision (my term) are undoubtedly the most affective moments in the film.
Wolf Man may be a misstep overall, but Leigh Whannell still has The Juice. And let’s be real, no serious person expected him to top The Invisible Man so soon. (Besides, topping Oliver Jackson-Cohen is my job—back off, Leigh!) But I can definitely see why a not-so-secret softie like Whannell would choose to go this route next. It’s a return to form in a way, since the parent-child bond has been a major motif in his writing dating back to the Saw films. So, it’s easy to imagine why he’d pivot to a daddy issues monster movie without much bite after helming a film as harrowing and nightmarish as The Invisible Man.
