Not long ago we had a reinterpretation of a vampiric classic with Egger’s Nosferatu—now Universal, after its extremely abortive ‘Dark Universe’ that turned its attempted resurrection of horror monster icons into Tom Cruise thrashing with flurries of CGI, it seemed they’re having a more balanced go. Director Leigh Whannel did manage to return the Invisible Man into the modern zeitgeist in 2020, with an interpretation I actually quite liked for the most part—it was markedly different from the source but in ways that worked. So now, he returns to the Wolf Man, one of the classic lychanthrophic titles that Del Toro tried to take on 15 years ago with mixed results—how does this one turn out?
Well, there are definitely aspects I like—the setting makes full use of lush and isolated forest valleys to create a sense of all-encompassing nature, and most of the performances are solid enough. It all takes place around one farmstead, mostly, to create a solid sense of geography, and there are some interesting themes going on at first. We have a family played by father Christopher Abbot, mother Julia Garner, and daughter Matilda Firth as they visit the former’s paternal ranch in the middle of nowhere…with a unpleasant chance encounter on a night road.
The setup is definitely a nice idea—here the vulpine transformation is something slow and gradual, like a disease consuming the body, drowning out even base human concepts like language. With real-life illnesses just as capable of degrading someone close, it does manage to hit close to home, and the horror here comes less from teeth and claws than our family just trying to figure out helplessly what to do with someone they care about.
That being said, I’m not sure about the payoff—there’s an idea here of something to do with the sins of our fathers or trauma passed down, but it doesn’t feel like it amounts to anything. While the transformation idea as mentioned is definitely solid, it feels like it could’ve gone a little further, with a climax and last feeling just a bit cut short.
For whatever reason it does feel like they had a slashed budget or something, but while I liked where it was going for, it didn’t go quite all the way for me personally. There’s definitely memorable moments but just a bit more meat could’ve gone on the bones around them.
It doesn’t make it bad, but I preferred Whannel’s take on Invisible Man for sure. Still, there is some definite effort here to update a classic idea appropriately—so I’m certainly up for whatever else might come down the pipeline in this regard. Certainly smaller flicks like this one with more room to experiment feel the way to go there than Dark Universes that blinked out before they began…
Comments
Post a Comment