“In early 1995, a hiker went missing in the remote mountains of central Oregon,” reads the prologue over a gorgeous opening shot: a still, wide frame looking down at a farm surrounded by dense forest and looming mountains, dark clouds hanging overhead. The mythology of the film appears in four different text sections over the landscape composition, each one getting us a little closer to our subject: Wolf Man.
As the prologue informs us, a wolf man has been sighted in the central Oregon area over the years, but only ever briefly, leading locals to believe the missing hiker contracted a new animal-borne virus called “hills fever.” Or as the indigenous people used to call it: “face of the wolf.”
Lore in the rearview, our story begins with the worst dad ever––a hot-tempered father (Sam Jaeger) and his sheepish son Blake (Zac Chandler, a perfectly cast Christopher Abbott lookalike boy) hunting in the central Oregon woods surrounding the farm we saw in the opening shot. Dad impatiently tries to teach his son how to hunt the right way, but he is… just a kid. Blake gets distracted when he catches sight of a bipedal monster-creature in his scope. It’s gone when he looks back, but Dad knows something is out there, too. Within seconds (very little time is wasted across 103 minutes) they’re hightailing it out of there, wolf man on their tail in a riveting sequence in which they manage to escape.
Fast-forward to the present: Blake is in his thirties, married to Charlotte (Julia Garner) and father of Ginger (Matilda Firth), who’s about the age Blake was in the opening sequence. They live in the city, but Charlotte and Blake aren’t happy together anymore, a quiet defeat setting into their marriage with a sense of true finality. We learn through a letter Blake gets in the mail that his dad, who had gone missing shortly after we met him, is finally declared dead, despite never being found.
On the heels of closure and potential rebirth, Blake pitches Charlotte on spending the summer in Oregon at his dad’s old farm, just the three of them. She begrudgingly agrees. They set off in a moving van, more or less arrive, and before they can find the driveway, much less get out of the car, they’re brutally attacked by Wolf Man. They make it into the house unscathed… or so it seems. As it turns out, Wolf Man drug a claw deep through Blake’s arm.
As the night passes, so does Blake, his human sensibilities replaced by wolf-like instincts, everyone unsure how aware he’ll be of his family when (if?) he finally transforms. Will he recognize them or hunt them? Or turn into something else entirely? The journey of his transformation is Wolf Man‘s greatest strength, amplified by great gross makeup, hair, and protruding prosthetics. Every change brings a new Blake, and while the beats are thoroughly telegraphed––every relative “surprise” predictable from a mile out––crafty execution helps them typically land with a bang.
Writer-turned-director (once known for the first few Saw movies) Leigh Whannell expresses Blake’s changes effectively through clever visual tricks, e.g. Blake hearing a giant monster inside the house, baffled as to what it is and how it got in. He braves the direction of the sound only to discover a spider crawling up a wall––Blake’s hearing is now literally wolf-like. The best of these tricks is 180º Wolf Vision, which Whannell uses to communicate what characters are experiencing on both sides of the story.
In a few different phases of his transformation, when either Charlotte or Ginger are talking to him, we see Blake from their perspective: deteriorating, huffing, beastifying, growing more confused. Then, slowly, the camera moves toward Blake but turns toward Charlotte or Ginger, the visual and sonic atmosphere of the shot changing drastically as the camera assumes Blake’s perspective: the words coming out of their mouths are gibberish, their eyes are a piercing flame of ice, their faces look slightly morphed, and the world around them turns an electric blue-green.
An actor since 1996 and self-made horror screenwriter since 2003, Whannell shifted to directing in 2015 with the third chapter of Insidious, by far his least-impressive film. Since then he’s found his footing with the hit sci-fi film Upgrade and breathtaking remake of The Invisible Man. Wolf Man follows much more in his recent creative lineage than Insidious: Chapter 3. That success is largely thanks to Whannell’s storytelling chops (however clichéd, he manages to make them work) and Stefan Duscio’s phenomenal cinematography, which cooks a frightening wonder into the Oregon forest and keeps you locked in during impending jumpscare moments. You know you should look away, but the frame is just too nice.
Whannell, Duscio, and team could’ve drummed up another forgettable Blumhouse horror picture and probably made the same amount of money, but true care, precision, and artistry emerges. In that sense, the film has more to say than five typical Blumhouse pictures combined. In no uncertain or un-literal terms, Wolf Man is about the hereditary horrors our parents pass down to us––the same ones we unleash on our children––and our willingness, or lack thereof, to take responsibility for them, to kill them. It’s a fine return for Whannell after being off the scene these last few years.
Wolf Man opens on Friday, January 17.