Wolf Man: creature feature sinks its fangs into toxic patriarchy

“This view never gets old, does it? No matter how many times you see it.” The speaker is Grady Lowell (Sam Jaeger), an ex-Marine survivalist and single father raising his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) with the toughest kind of love on their remote off-grid Oregon property. Grady’s words, coming near the beginning of Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, refer specifically to a spectacular valley, but might equally describe the horror subgenre that the film’s title clearly advertises, whose many phases and forms, though as changeable as a werewolf’s, have been pleasingly familiar since Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935) and Curt Siodmak’s The Wolf Man (1941). Much as he did in 2020 with The Invisible Man, here Whannell takes the legacy of a Universal monster into territories new. 

Out hunting, Grady and little Blake have a frightening encounter. Cut to 30 years later, and Blake (Christopher Abbott), who got out from under his aggressive father’s thumb as soon as he could, is now himself a father living in the more civilised New York City with his journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), and trying, despite the odd flash of temper, to give better parenting than he received. But when Grady, long missing, is officially declared dead, Blake will go back with his new family not just to the old property in the Oregon wilderness, but to an inheritance of bestial violence, as a second encounter in the woods turns into a tense Oedipal drama. “I think he may have given his sickness to daddy,” Charlotte will tell Ginger of the grandfather she never met, as the fangs come out and Blake succumbs to a family history of toxic, feral patriarchy.  

This well-handled psychological subtext is key here, in an unusually intimate werewolf film whose protagonist, though turning irreversibly atavistic, still remains half modern and half man to the bitter end. Blake is tragically caught between received primal urges and a desire to improve upon the previous generation. But what starts as a story of a father and son, with Blake reverting to old patterns of behaviour the moment he gets back to daddy’s house, will slowly metamorphose into the story of a mother and daughter, with Charlotte both proving her toughness and fully embracing maternal feelings for Ginger that she had doubted. In a nightmarish domestic scenario, this fragile family is beleaguered over one long night and threatened with being brutally torn apart from both outside and inside. Meanwhile Blake’s conflicted identity is externalised, tooth and claw, even as the camera occasionally shares his new lycanthropic point-of-view, transforming the world into a shimmering, pulsating vision of strange spectral wonder.

► Wolf Man is available in UK cinemas from 17 January.