- Director: Leigh Whannell
- Screenplay: Leigh Whannell, Corbett Tuck
- Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
- Cinematography: Stefan Duscio
- Editing: Andy Canny
- Score: Benjamin Wallfisch
- Genre: Horror
- Runtime: 103 minutes
When writer Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) takes his workaholic wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their daughter Ginger to the Oregon mountains where he spent his childhood to reconnect as a family unit away from the bustle of city life, the last thing he’d appreciate is being menaced by a werewolf.
On route things get hairy: Blake swerves off the road after seeing a humanoid figure standing there. In the aftermath of the crash, he’s slashed by a ‘wild animal’. Cue the standard transformation: a few hours later, he has become the titular ‘Wolf Man’. It’s a reboot of the classic Universal Pictures horror of 1941, given a modern day setting. The film is standalone, the plotted interconnected ‘Dark Universe‘ franchise featuring iconic ghouls such as Frankenstein’s Monster and Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde having been scrapped in favour of one-off projects, like 2020’s ‘The Invisible Man‘ (also directed by Leigh Whannell).
By keeping it simple in terms of plot and location (one isolated farmhouse), this means there’s less material to work with. Once her husband turns into a wolf, all Charlotte really gets to do now is be chased through a pitch-black forest. So what? Your husband’s a werewolf? Big deal. I’ve known men with more body hair than that.
Trippy visuals where the camera slowly pans around to see events from Blake’s perspective grab your attention for a handful of seconds but this is your typical ‘January Jinx’ movie; predictably low quality and sent out by the studio to die. What a howler.
My rating: 4 / 10
SilverScreen 