Even for a werewolf movie, Wolf Man fucking sucks. Following up on his sleeper hit remake of The Invisible Man, writer-director Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3, Upgrade) goes for another one of Universal’s classic monsters with Wolf Man. A sparse take on a hairy tale, Wolf Man is more boring than any film can bear.
After inheriting his father’s cabin in the woods in Central Oregon, Blake (Christopher Abbott), Charlotte (Julia Garner), and Ginger (Matilda Firth) have to defend themselves from a lupine aggressor, but there’s more to this trip than meets the eye.
Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck’s screenplay takes paper-thin characters lacking much in the way of conflict and crams them in a tiny cabin. There are long moments of silence and quite little of the titular Wolf Man as the story lurches towards its predictable conclusion. Matilda Firth (Starve Acre, Typist Artist Pirate King) is all right as the precocious Ginger, but Julia Garner (The Assistant, The Royal Hotel) and Christopher Abbott (Sanctuary, The World to Come) fail to sell their marriage that’s on the skids.
Too often, Wolf Man feels like a stage play instead of a movie. There’s a handful of interesting ideas here with its gradual take on wolf transformation (increased hearing of other animals at the cost of not understanding human speech), but not much is done with it. Even worse is how the werewolf looks, resembling a balding hairy caveman more than a scary creature.
Neither scary nor suspenseful, Wolf Man whiffs at every hit it takes. Easily the worst horror film in recent memory, Wolf Man fails to deliver the wolfy goods.
Wolf Man is now playing in theatres.