Invisible Man Director transforms another universal monster

On January 22, 2025By Littum

There’s a shot in Wolf Man that’s so good it’s used twice. A parent and child—first father and son, then mother and daughter—hide in a hunter’s deer blind in the damp Oregon woods, cowering from an unseen threat. We hear the threat growl and huff as it approaches until it is inches away on the other side of a waist-high wooden door. It’s so close, in fact, that the steam from its breath rises over the top. Director Leigh Whannell frames the picture as a landscape with the door as the horizon. The image is creepy and beautiful, and the closest we’ll get to Wolf Man’s titular beast in a while.

We’ll see plenty of the monster later, both in its original incarnation and as family man Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) mutates after an attack. Whannell’s approach to the transformation scenes – a centerpiece of any werewolf film – is smart, as is typical of the Australian screenwriter-turned-director who helped launch the Saw and Insidious series before rebooting The Invisible Man in 2020. Blake decentralizes scene by scene, rather than all at once, eliminating any unconvincing transition moments. First, he breaks out in a red, painful rash. Then his jaw changes to an underbite. Then the fangs. The final form of this Wolfman is also unique, part Bigfoot and part burn victim.

Rank the universal monsters

Most interestingly, Whannell recreates lycanthropy from a curse to a disease, sending the afflicted into a green-and-purple delirium a bit like The Further in the Insidious movies. This fresh take on the werewolf story is a strength of Whannell’s version of The Wolf Man. Another is his knack for inventive, robotically precise camera movements. The sound design is also excellent, which goes a long way towards adding tension to several scenes of characters standing at the end of dark corridors and holding their breath. (On the downside, all that visual gloom means this is one of those movies that will be hampered by any theater that hasn’t properly balanced the contrast and brightness of its projectors.)

Then we must turn to history. After a documentary-style title card informing the viewer of a Pacific Northwest phenomenon indigenous people call “the face of the wolf,” an opening sequence takes us back to 1995, where a rugged survivalist and his son are terrorized by a walking dog creature. on two feet, leading to the cool shot mentioned above. Fast forward to 2025 San Francisco, where that kid has become one of the “soft” “soy boys” that infuriate certain people on the internet. Blake even stays home and raises his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) while his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) quite improbably supports the family with her salary as a newspaper reporter!

This will indeed come into play later, after the family heads to Oregon to pack up Blake’s father’s things, when the old man—who, we’re told, went into the woods one day and never came back—is finally declared legally dead. Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck are clearly trying to comment on masculinity in this film, but the final message is not flattering to women or men. In the first half, Charlotte is cold and critical, crippling her husband by blaming him for interrupting her important work call. She is still the girl boss in the second half, but in a heroic way; By then, the Wolf Man has shifted to portraying all men as beasts, the traits they inherit from guys like Blake’s hyper-macho father lying dormant within them just waiting to be activated. This is all laid out in the dialogue, if subtext really isn’t your thing.

Maybe Whannell and Tuck really are complete misanthropes and hate people of all genders. Or perhaps the jumbled messages are a side effect of the filmmakers’ intense focus on capturing stunning mountain scenery and creating cool, gritty dullness. (The scene where Abbott, crazed with wolf fever, gnaws at his own arm is a highlight.) The lighting in The Wolf Man is very theatrical, which is interesting; but it’s another symptom of prioritizing craft over storytelling, compounded by the fact that halfway through it’s obvious how this will all end.

Or who knows? As long as we’re throwing out theories: The original 1941 version of The Wolf Man is one of the weaker films in the Universal Monsters cycle, and Wolf Man is similarly inferior to Whannell’s own version of The Invisible Man. Weird way to pay homage to your influences, but okay.

Rank the universal monsters

Rank the universal monsters

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