Wolf Man is far too tame to be frightening
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Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner star in a film that feels jumbled and confused – by its end all you can ask is ‘huh?’. Universal’s Dark Universe, a planned Marvel-style franchise premised around the studio’s stable of classic monsters, was pronounced dead on arrival after the release of 2017’s frightful bore, The Mummy. Yet those creatures of the night have still snuck in through the back door thanks to Blumhouse, the powerhouse production company behind the Insidious movies and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
In 2020, they released Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which traded thundering spectacle for sleek, intimate horror, honouring the metaphorical terrors of HG Wells’s original novel, while transforming them, too, into an entirely new story about a woman’s attempts to free herself from the hold of an abusive partner. Whannell now returns with a follow-up (Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin will soon tackle a Mummy revival), that’s predicated on the same idea: to honour George Waggner’s 1941 classic The Wolf Man, while turning an eye to modern preoccupations. And, most importantly, to modern fears.
While its origins lie in a (now presumably revamped) pitch from Ryan Gosling, who departed the project in 2023, you can see much of Whannell’s DNA here. There’s a sincere commitment to craft, atmosphere, and character. Yet The Invisible Man’s central metaphor was simple but visceral, crawling up into the unguarded spaces of its audience’s psyche like a cockroach. Here, it’s as if the right words have been placed in the wrong order, leaving us with a jumbled sentence to unpick and nothing at the end but a sincere and confused, “Huh?”.
