With his marriage fraying, Blake persuades his wife Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit his remote childhood home in rural Oregon. As they arrive at the farmhouse in the dead of night...
From one classic monster movie remake to another, Leigh Whannell is back to replicate that earlier success with his “Wolf Man” reboot: an attempt that knows better than to just grin and bear its teeth….but outside a few blemishes of brilliance, it isn’t too keen on doing much else to save face.
My disappointment is immeasurable.
I struggle to make sense of whether or not this feels like a Leigh Whannell film. His direction remains decidedly old-school and retro on the sensibilities of sight, sound and the desolate weight of retooling tales of the past with modern finesse but here, it’s also heavily devoid of energy and, dare I say, he plays it too safe here. Unbelievably sub-standard.
My stance on limited production designs shouldn’t bare repeating but this just annoyed me. There is a thing as being too confined within your setting; middling in scope and scale, the vast landscape of the Oregon forest and countryside is almost a non-factor when carrying over that same heady atmosphere from the first act and none of the settings are really utilized to the highest potential even if harking back to the classic fog-shrouded landscapes of old does make for some mild immersion.
The presentation thankfully doesn’t come off too gimmicky but it strands itself in the murk with an aura and lighting so obscure, it gets more personality when perspectives are switched and there’s hardly much rhythm or consistency to the editing: half the time it’s as condensed and perfunctory as the environment, other times it’s choppy and hurried in its haste, especially when the pacing moves ungodly fast for a feature clocking in at 103 minutes. Only through Stefan Duscio’s cinematography does the imagery come the closest to feeling alive.
Scares get better results through the body horror than the stupid jumpscares they fall back on, tension comes and goes sporadically, it barely lives up to its R-rating, the blend of physical artistry with digital wizardry to create a creature both terrifying and tragically human is immaculately detailed, the sound design is pure discordant, sharp crunchy and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score does better setting up the atmosphere than the actual production design does.
I’ll save the rest for what I can say about the cast for later but man oh man, everybody here comes across so visibly and physically adrift. Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner have brief spurts of intensity and pathos once it gets to the meat and potatoes near the end but their chemistry stays wooden for SO LONG and the script being so terminally toothless effectively damns everybody to mediocrity immediately.
Dialogue doesn’t fair much better either.
What immediately alerted me about this take on the story wasn’t how quickly they took to doubling down on the “less is more” approach with the narrative……but how their best play for achieving that was apparently to cut the story in half. No hyperbole, dead serious, it’s so half-baked and quarter cooked in everything it tries to convey, I’m in complete disbelief that Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck ACTUALLY wrote this. Lot of what we get feels very empty and it’s singular focus on compressing everything outside the transformation without supplying the heart results in a loose but not limber film structure and I take issue with the constant stop-start momentum as a result of that. It’s a very tell, don’t show type of experience and that doesn’t exactly fit Leigh’s style or the potential these werewolf films could reach.
The biggest factor meant to drive this story, a semi-dysfunctional family barely sticking together in the face of tragedy desperate to survive when one of their own turns into a monster, is arguably the film’s main source of irritation. I can overlook them not giving them anything to play with in terms of character but upon setting up trouble in paradise with this nuclear family to detour right back into familiar cliched territory never ceases to irritate me, especially when the signs were right there: shifting power dynamics in a relationship, a nature vs nurture debate, reimagining lycanthropy as a virus (perhaps as COVID analogy), generational trauma handed down by overbearing parents who, in their haste to protect their family, cause pain that never heals and how being a determined parental figure doesn’t make you a good one. Body horrors like this are meant to strum that chord progression of unease and shock at the tragedy of said transformation so to tease all that baggage only to keep all the characters at arms length effectively does the same for the story’s potential.
Constantly toying with and then abandoning the thematic depth that made the Invisible Man and Upgrade remarkable is frustrating, especially when the first act prologue held all of its potential and the alternative they chose feels repetitive and derivative of other Blumhouse features. Oh, and the fact that most other werewolf depictions result back to this theme.
The one film this January I was actually looking forward to disappointed me. Props can be given for Whannell’s ambitious, more human approach to the story but without its heart, it slots itself in with the other January dumping ground schlock so interchangeably, the end result comes across like just another Blumhouse feature.
