What starts out as the beginning of a great family holiday in the Oregon woods soon turns into a bloody fight for survival. While father Blake Lovell is forced to protect his family from a werewolf-like creature, he soon begins to realise that it is rather his family that needs to be protected from himself, because it soon turns out that he is infected with the werewolf virus... or whatever you want to call it according to the film's new lore.
Leigh Whannell is clearly a very creative filmmaker, as he demonstrated in his recent The Invisble Man interpretation and the Gamereactor favourite Upgrade. But in Wolf Man he seems to have left some of that imagination at home, because this is a tame werewolf film. A well-made and stylish one, I might add. But the claws are a little too well-groomed in this film version. The protagonist's slow transformation into the title character is of course the highlight, with Whannell getting more playful with the use of sound and camera movement from the wolf's perspective. I really like how tormented Christopher Abbott's character feels as he gets further and further away from his family and closer to his inner beast. It's more of a psychological take on the werewolf legend, which feels refreshing.
Unfortunately, Wolf Man is not as edgy as I had hoped. It feels mostly vague, unsure. It's more of a tragic mystery than a straightforward thriller, but it's not much of a mystery either. For such a short film, it's an unexpectedly sweet film that is weighed down by stilted dialogue and questionable acting. Sometimes Wolf Man feels really inspired and atmospheric. Sometimes it feels strangely flat and unexciting, with the build-up to the whole thing in particular feeling unnecessarily slow and flabby. On the one hand, I can like the simplicity of the story, which here focuses on a tale of generational trauma and how fear can rule your life, but it fails to click emotionally and there's not much of a pulse in the long run as you can quickly figure out how the film will end.
Wolf Man is a simple monster story that focuses more on dehumanisation and the anguish of helplessly watching a family member wither away, which is at least more original than just watching people get slaughtered in a cabin. At the same time, Wolf Man lacks a real pulse and the intimate humanity that the director tries to preserve here is more contrived than anything else. The psychological concept works, as I said, when given the space, but otherwise this is a generic sit-tight-in-a-cabin thriller with very little bite.