‘Wolf Man’ review: bloody creature feature is also a biting family drama

Horror movies don’t have to be about something bigger than themselves in order to be ‘credible’ or worthwhile – but sometimes the genre excels at helping us to understand a difficult subject in a deep and unexpected way. Hereditary, for example, knocked our blocks off in 2018 with its relentlessly nightmarish analysis of inherited traits, while 2020’s Relic dredged up all our deep-rooted fears around illness and ageing. Wolf Man, Australian director Leigh Whannell’s reboot of the 1941 Universal Pictures werewolf classic, takes both topics in its blood-matted paws and mashes in a chunk of rubbery ‘80s body horror for good measure.

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Blake (Christopher Abbott), an out-of-work writer in San Francisco, carries psychological scars from a difficult upbringing in rural Oregon. Having not spoken to his paranoid and over-protective father for years, he’s determined to foster a healthy relationship with his own daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Less rosy is his relationship with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), a workaholic who somehow supports a family of three in San Francisco on a journalist’s salary. When his father is declared dead, Blake takes the family on a would-be healing trip to his childhood home, a secluded farm surrounded by woodland that’s subject to folkloric rumours about a mysterious disease.

Well, we already know what happens next. Whannell’s film is largely successful, though, because Blake’s such a likeable character that you really don’t want the inevitable to occur – and when it does, the action is so frenetic that you simply can’t look away. Blake, valuing his family more than anything in the world, barricades them all in the house to keep out the beastie that’s already slashed his arm.

What follows is a seriously claustrophobic face-off that’s as thrilling as it is tragic. Wolf Man moves with all the speed and precision of a silver bullet, as Whannell expertly orchestrates two standout sequences – one involving a vehicle that plummets through the woodland, another atop a polytunnel – that are nothing short of jaw-dropping.

In a recent interview, the director told NME that the film is about “the fragility of the human body and losing somebody close to you”, as well as marriages that go awry because “you’re just speaking a different language”. Indeed, it’s painful to witness Charlotte and Ginger’s inability to understand what is happening to Blake. Whannell’s clearly not lost the empathetic touch he brought to his last movie, 2020’s The Invisible Man, a fellow Universal remake that he turned into a thought-provoking treatise on the haunting after-effects of domestic abuse.

Wolf Man isn’t quite as creepy or emotionally charged as its predecessor. Some of the dad trauma stuff is laid on a bit thick and the whole enterprise runs out of puff in its final third, partly because the titular creature doesn’t actually look very scary (at times, you sense a strong coffee and a fry-up would sort him out).

For the most part, however, this is a superior B-movie chockablock with enjoyable nerdy horror references (buffs will already have clocked Blake’s daughter’s name) and flashes of gross-out gore. In the end, a werewolf eating its own arm works on any level.