Last weekend I met a friend at the movie theater to catch the new atmospheric monster film, "Wolf Man". I invited this friend to join me since we haven't seen each other in a while. And at the end of the film, I leaned next to her face and whispered, "I'm sorry." She and I both agreed this was less an exciting horror entry and more an annoying waste of our time.
A husband and wife named Blake and Charlotte (Christopher Abbott from "Poor Things," 2023 and Julia Garner from "Inventing Anna," 2022), living in San Francisco with their obligatory little daughter, are feeling a bit distant from each other for no reason whatsoever. Once their relationship vibe is established, the three family members drive into a remote forest in Oregon to clean out Blake's childhood home after his father's recent death. They crash their moving van (but maybe it's a truck I can't remember), catch glimpses of a mysterious animal in the dark, and barricade themselves inside the empty childhood farmhouse.
What tries to be an intensely emotional fight for survival, and a maintaining of family connections, ends up being super boring with nothing interesting or unexpected to say. Even when the loving father reveals a scratch on his forearm, beginning his unstoppable transformation into a werewolf approximately half-way into this film, it isn't enough to keep viewers interested, because it's been too much already.
"The Wolfman" was also a film released in 2010 with Anthony Hopkins, "Wolf" starred Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer in 1994, and Stephen King's novella, "Cycle of the Werewolf" was adapted into the 1985 film, "Silver Bullet." All these films are terrible, but it doesn't stop Hollywood producers and directors from going back to this popular concept to give it their try. The only werewolf film that still remains memorably effective is 1981's "An American Werewolf in London" (written and directed by John Landis), because that film manages to be both physically frightening and psychologically haunting.
Australian director Leigh Whannell had moderately successful updates on classic 1930s horror icons with the female-centered twist in "The Invisible Man" (2020) and the technology-infused twist on "Frankenstein" in the 2018 thriller, "Upgrade." So I get why Leigh Whannell is the director and co-screenwriter for "Wolf Man." But it's a serious bummer this director (and everyone on his team) had zero ideas to make the lupine monster story fresh or entertaining.
So many moments in this film show the husband and wife staring silently into each other's eyes grieving at the mystery of his hairy transformation (or feebly trying to communicate with each other). But these moments last so long, I started thinking, "Did this screenplay even have enough ideas to warrant a film being made in the first place? Definitely not!" When the husband and wife aren't sadly staring at each other, the rest of the film shows them continually running from the growling monster to an abandoned truck, to a barn, to a plastic greenhouse. The opening sequence of a young boy and his strict father hunting together in the quiet forest has some promise with well-crafted suspense. But then it all goes downhill from there.
But not to worry everyone, because I have an idea. I'm going to write a legally binding contract forbidding any werewolf films to be made by anyone for the next 100 years. Then I'm going to travel to Hollywood and get every film director and studio executive to sign this contract in their own blood. Problem solved! (I literally spent the latter half of this film thinking about writing such a contract and what it would specifically say.) When the closing credits were playing, and my friend and I were chatting about this film in the murky theater, she said, "I think I'm dumber after watching that." I couldn't have said it better myself, girl!