Wolfman | A were-dad who leaves us wanting more

Synopsis: Following the death of his father, a man, his wife and their young daughter travel to the depths of Oregon to recover some belongings from his childhood home. However, they come up against a creature that haunts the woods.

Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell made a name for himself by penning the screenplays for the first three Saw then those of the films Insidious. He stepped behind the camera for the third in the series and later directed The Invisible Man. In short, he knows a thing or two about horror.

Like The Invisible Man, Wolf Man (Werewolfin French version) is a remake of a classic monster movie from Universal studio, in this case released in 1941. And as in The Invisible Manthis new proposition places the events in our time.

An unemployed writer, Blake (Christopher Abbott, invested) devotes himself entirely to his daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth, rather convincing). Caring, he doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of his father, who was more concerned with survival in the harsh Oregon forest than with parenting. Blake, who has just received confirmation of his father’s death, then offers his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner, who has little to eat) and his daughter to accompany him on the road from San Francisco to Oregon to show them his childhood home.

Near their destination, Blake can no longer find his way back to his old home. Lost in a dense forest where cell service is non-existent, the trio comes across a former neighbor…and a monstrous creature. The family will manage to locate the house, but the meeting between the beast and the father will trigger an irreversible transformation.

The first act of Wolf Man foreshadowed a story built around an ordeal that a family must face. By insisting, we can draw a parallel between Blake’s metamorphosis into a werewolf and the illness of a loved one or the radicalization of a loved one; a metaphor for our helplessness in the face of certain situations. But these interpretations are only the result of our reflections, because the film written by Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck remains on the surface. While The Invisible Man troubled us by pushing the limits of psychological violence, Wolf Man is content to frighten – timidly – ​​our eyes and our ears.

The work is still a success in this regard. The sound in particular: the guttural growls, the creaking of floors, the creaking of doors, the whistling of the wind. The music of Benjamin Wallfisch (Alien : Romulus, Twisters) also evokes the old horror classics in a beautiful way.

The scenarios of these being relatively simple, it is necessary to flesh them out if we propose a new version. Or to focus on impeccable aesthetics as Robert Eggers did for Nosferatu. Wolf Man isn’t bad, but doesn’t stand out in any way.

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