Wolf Man (2 stars out of 4)
In January of 2013, once I became a weekly film critic, I started to notice the patterns inherent to my new job. For example, one of the first movies I covered that year was a horror film called, “Mama.” I remember very little about the movie aside from a CGI-heavy finale that was unsatisfying, but looking back, it was the first time I covered what I eventually recognized as the, “obligatory January horror release.”
Somewhere in the aftermath of the holidays, the new year gets going with a B-level horror film. “Mama” was the first one I covered, but each year more followed. “The Forest” was the obligatory 2016 release, and “The Bye-Bye Man” took the 2017 spot. Last year’s entry was “Night Swim.” In each case, the movies are anywhere from flawed to serviceable, and rarely memorable. In fact, I had to go back into my archives to identify “The Forest” and “The Bye-Bye Man.”
This year, Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man” checks the “obligatory January horror release” box, and as I figured, it landed in that same flawed to serviceable range. The story is pretty simple. A down-on-his-luck dad takes his family to the Central Oregon wilderness where he grew up, and they get into a showdown with a werewolf-type creature.
We first meet Blake (Christopher Abbott) as a young boy in Oregon, on a hunting trip with his taskmaster father. They have a close encounter with what his dad initially insists was a bear, but Blake later determines their attacker may have been a missing hiker who locals believe had turned into a wolfman.
So thirty years later, when Blake gets news of his father’s death, he packs up his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) to go pack up the family home, and give them all a break from the day-to-day stresses that have been putting a strain on the marriage. Naturally, things fail to go according to plan, and “Wolf Man” quickly turns into a standoff between Blake’s family and something in the woods that is definitely not a bear.
Fortunately, the plot has a little more in terms of twists and turns than what I’ve described above, and though “Wolf Man” rarely escalates beyond some boilerplate jump scares and tension, I watched it with a modest appreciation for its effort to play with an otherwise routine formula. Without giving too much away, Whannell uses some interesting POV techniques to add depth to the confrontation, and eventually the threat gets a little more multi-dimensional than your standard horror dynamic.
Though there isn’t any sexual content or excessive profanity, “Wolf Man” earns its R rating with some sickening visuals and a cringe-inducing range of sound effects. It’s not enough to rival the more celebrated wolfman movies of the past, like “An American Werewolf in London,” but in the context of the story it works. Things are also kind of predictable in places, though, and by the time the film wrapped up, I got the sense that despite its efforts, “Wolf Man” is going to be another January horror film I struggle to remember in a year or two.
Like last year’s “Night Swim,” it’s easy to come away from “Wolf Man” wishing that the filmmakers had pushed things a little farther. “Night Swim” would have been a lot more memorable if they’d steered into the inherent campiness of a killer swimming pool. “Wolf Man” would have benefitted from a bit more commitment and crazy as well. Maybe we’ll get “Wolf Men” in January 2026?
“Wolf Man” is rated R for gruesome violence and gore, as well as some scattered profanity.