Fans of “SCTV” may remember a “Monster Chiller Horror Theatre” episode in which Joe Flaherty’s late-night host, Count Floyd, mistakenly programs a made-up Ingmar Bergman film, “Whispers of the Wolf,” thinking it’s a simple werewolf picture instead of a moody, existential mashup of Bergman’s “Hour of the Wolf” and “Persona.”
The new “Wolf Man” from Universal Pictures and co-writer/director Leigh Whannell may likewise provoke some puzzled Count Floyd-esque looks of confusion among horror fans. Not that it’s a failure or a joke. Whannell, whose bracing, sharp-edged 2020 remake of “The Invisible Man” ushered us into the cold-creeps COVID era, makes genre films for a wide audience, adults included. He doesn’t play these Universal franchise reboots for kicks.
In “Wolf Man,” he really doesn’t. The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror. They’re also a bit of a plod — especially in the second half, when whatever kind of horror film you’re making should not, you know, plod.
The first half is crafty, patient and deceptively good. A 1990s prologue introduces young Blake (Christopher Abbott) and his surly father, venturing into a remote corner of the Oregon woods (New Zealand portrays Oregon) on a hunting expedition. They live nearby; Blake has yet to hear about the rumored “face of the wolf” creature sharing the same woods that First Nation tribes have feared for centuries. Protecting his son in a shrewdly staged attack, the father disappears into the woods, presumed dead.
Thirty years later in present-day San Francisco, Blake is an unemployed writer and full-time caregiver, married to workaholic journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner). She’s stress incarnate, envious of her husband’s close emotional bond with their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). With the arrival of his long-missing father’s death certificate, Blake inherits the rural Oregon house. For the sake of the troubled family, Charlotte agrees to spend some time with Ginger in this place.
From there, the movie narrows its geographic parameters, transforming into a close-quarters drama of three people in an old dark house, surrounded by lots of shrewdly designed sounds and beset by a werewolf stalking the visitors like it means business. Once Blake suffers a flesh wound at the hands of this predator, Whannell’s devotion to, among other films, David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” becomes apparent. “Wolf Man” delves into the fractured psyche and grotesque physical disintegration of a man stricken with an animal-borne virus, terrified of what it’s doing to him and what he may end up doing to those he loves. In other words, it’s a movie about every indignity an unemployed writer must suffer, lycanthropy included.
Even when her character takes a more urgent role in this hermetic story, the excellent Garner doesn’t have much to play outside a parade of slow-roll nonverbal shots of Charlotte peering this way and that, taking charge of a rapidly dissolving situation but never really getting her due. (The script is by Whannell and his partner Corbett Tuck.) “Wolf Man’s” seriousness is heavy going. Its leitmotif sticks, doggedly, to the idea of transmutable, unholy fears, and sins of the fathers, transmitted like a virus down the family line. A rare in-joke pops up on the side of the moving van Blake rents to clear out his father’s house: The company has been in business since 1941, the slogan notes, taking us back to the year Universal made hay with Lon Chaney Jr. in “The Wolf Man.”
That was neither the first nor the last werewolf movie. This one, originally slated for Ryan Gosling and director Derek Cianfrance, goes about its business with a solemn air, even when it’s super-blechy and Abbott is chewing on his own forearm for obvious reasons: an unemployed writer’s gotta eat.
“Wolf Man” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for bloody violent content, grisly images and some language)
Running time: 1:43
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Jan. 17
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
