Wolf Man

Morose and taciturn even before anybody gets themselves swiped by a hirsute trapper, director Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man, co-written with Corbett Tuck, pays special attention to the diminishing mental faculties of a person who is slowly transforming into an animal against their will. After an aggravated window smasher sinks their talons into his forearm, Christopher Abbott's Blake, the unemployed father in a family slowly running aground, mottles then begins gnawing on himself. This autophagia apparently a welcome distraction from the thundering household insects and blaring, featureless family members that slowly become the totality of this would-be werewolf's sensory experience. Although tense in terms of moment-to-moment conflict on the back end, the biggest problem with Whannell's latest is that the film's disinclination to communicate is felt even in the piece's earliest chapters, long before we are given any inkling of the gasping, crouching terror to come. 

Blake and his wife Charlotte, played by Julia Garner, are the barest sketch of a couple growing apart from each other. Any connection felt between them is more down to physical proximity and their very obvious role as parents rather than any speech or situation that might offer insight into their (seemingly rather shallow) marital discord. Blake, Charlotte, and their daughter Ginger, all feel artificially estranged from one other, as if all of their contradictions and complications have been cruelly snipped away. They are all exhausted and defeated before we ever get a chance to know them. Yes, Whannell's Wolf Man has scaffolding that loudly proclaims generational trauma to be their underlining thesis but Blake barely blows his top before his voice is taken away from him. Similarly, the film contextualises its nail-popping transformation in terms of an aching terminal illness, but then never spares a moment to sit with the effect this expedited decay is having on Blake's powerless loved ones. Sadly, the kind of familial implosion that Wolf Man reaches for is only really felt when it's clear that something genuinely precious is being lost.