Released right before the pandemic shut theaters down worldwide, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a smart, suspenseful and successful reimagining of the 1933 Universal Monsters classic. Five years later, Whannell has adapted a similar tack for Wolf Man, a redo of the lycanthrope-centric chiller from 1941. While updating horror properties from that era isn’t necessarily a bad plan, this latest entry proves that having the same filmmaker continue to refresh them may not be the best way forward. Originally, this project was to star Ryan Gosling, with his two-time collaborator Derek Cianfrance to direct, and while it’s difficult to know how that would’ve turned out, it’s not hard to imagine a comparatively more challenging result creatively.

Wolf Man centers around the San Francisco-based Lovell family, with Charlotte (Julia Garner) working long hours in the city as a journalist, while Blake (Christopher Abbott) serves as stay-at-home dad to their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake gets word that his estranged father Grady (Sam Jaeger) has been officially declared dead after going missing near his home in rural Oregon and in an effort to settle his affairs, the three make the trip up north together. En route, their moving truck crashes in the woods and though everyone makes it out alive, Blake sustains a scratch from an unseen creature while in the wilderness. The Lovells make it on foot to Grady’s secluded house but as the night goes on, Blake gradually turns into something monstrous and dangerous for Charlotte and Ginger.

A prologue that depicts a younger Blake and Grady on a hunting trip in the mid-90s seems to set up Wolf Man‘s would-be thesis about parental responsibility and cycles of generational emotional damage. Unfortunately, Leigh Whannell and his co-scribe Corbett Tuck aren’t able to marry those themes to the material nearly as well as Whannell did previously in The Invisible Man. Instead, most of the movie falls into tired body horror tropes as Blake loses human trappings like fingernails and teeth, while Charlotte and Ginger look on wide-eyed and worried. Whannell throws in the occasional curveball, as when Blake’s hearing is amplified to the degree that a spider crawling on a wall comes through to him as thunderous thumping sounds, but there aren’t enough of those to keep his transformation interesting.

The majority of Wolf Man is in the hands of Abbott, Garner and Firth while they’re holed up in the farm house and while they’re all doing their best, the script gives them very little much to work with. Abbott is a talented actor but even he can’t find a way to make his character break through as his speech breaks down and the werewolf prosthetics pile on. Garner is even more underserved here, saddled with an underwritten wife role that completely squanders the commendable range she displayed in much better movies like The Assistant and The Royal Hotel. Though Abbott and Garner are portraying characters who are struggling with a strained marriage, it doesn’t help that the actors really don’t have any chemistry with one another that makes them worth rooting for.

Once Blake goes full lupine, Wolf Man crawls through familiar horror beats where mother and daughter run and hide from the scary monster that has emerged. While there are occasionally tense moments, Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio too often opt for dimly-lit scenes that don’t clearly present the characters’ struggle. There are certainly interesting ways to use lighting — or an absence of light — in horror movies, but nearly every scene in the second half of this movie made me want to crank the screen’s brightness slider to the right. It’s possible this could’ve been intentional to cover up the stodgy and stilted computer-generated effects, which don’t look nearly as convincing as the laudable makeup work. Universal will no doubt keep reviving their Classic Monster lineup but this Wolf Man would’ve been better left in its cage.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, is a period drama about a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States, where he struggles to achieve the American Dream until a wealthy client changes his life.
Inheritance, starring Phoebe Dynevor and Rhys Ifans, is an espionage thriller about a young woman who is drawn into an international conspiracy after discovering her father is a spy.
Flight Risk, starring Mark Wahlberg and Topher Grace, is an action film about a pilot who transports an Air Marshal and a fugitive to trial but they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar as not everyone on board is who they seem.