Wolf Man: pretty bad guy (review)
The director of Upgrade and Invisible Man rubs shoulders with the myth of the werewolf, without convincing.
Who could say no to a hundred-minute werewolf film, which tells (almost in real time) how a family of three finds itself trapped in a godforsaken house, and besieged by a lurking lycanthrope? From a simple economic point of view, Wolf Man is quite remarkable for its reduced dimensions and modest aims. Unfortunately, despite its decidedly very micro Stephen King movie appearance (the family facing the mythical US bestiary), Wolf Man doesn’t really satisfy.
It all begins in Oregon, in 1995, based on a very amusing on-screen text which gives the film roots in the world of American urban legends. (“in 1995, a hiker disappeared…”). A hunter (paramilitary and quite brutal) and his kid have a strange encounter in the woods. Thirty years later, the son (Christopher Abbottnot bad at all), his wife and their daughter return to the scene to empty the house; and, my goodness, you can see clearly what is going to happen. The mechanical SFX and hard makeup, effective because visibly designed by people who know their classics (Chris Walas from The Fly and Rick Baker of Werewolf of London are quoted literally), poorly conceal the fact that the mechanics of Wolf Man doesn’t really work. What does the film actually say?
Let’s see Wolf Man in the light of the film of Leigh Whannell as director: Upgradebelow-Robocop funny, didn’t really have any other aim than to entertain and it worked quite well. Invisible Man more or less effectively redraws the figure of the invisible man in the #MeToo era. Wolf Manwell… Just a lupine closed door, then? The expected popularity of the B series is very meager: little action, little stakes, few monsters, little gore… The transformation into a werewolf, after a brilliant scene based on the sound (we won’t say no more), becomes visual: the lupine vision sequences especially evoke the scenes where Frodo puts on the Ring at Peter Jackson’s house. As if the were-film also wanted to change form, and still have more face than a good little trip to the land of lupins.
And the family dynamic is more caricatured than sketched. The hero is a stay-at-home father who is a bit nervous but who spoils his daughter, in a double contrast: both with his own childhood, which we imagine to be violent, and with his wife, an elegant city journalist who clearly puts her career before her family. . Does his change into a not really evil monster mean that toxic men aren’t really that bad, deep down, and that every were hides a nice daddy hen under his claws? Or the opposite? Funny speech, a little confused, that the film delivers awkwardly, and which leaves you perplexed.
The ambivalence of Invisible Man (the revenge of a battered woman against her attacker) was much more interesting, because it clashed with two themes that were a priori not very compatible (the cinema encore and the #MeToo testimonies). Next to, Wolf Man is not strong enough, not hairy enough… “Sometimes we hurt the people we love because we love them too much”sums up the dad to his daughter, apologizing after risking traumatizing her. Perhaps, precisely, the film does not say things directly enough, does not show the traumas enough. There was no need to take so many precautions either: it’s only a film, after all. No ?
