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In 2020, Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell had a surprisingly big hit with a modern-day update of the Universal Pictures horror classic The Invisible Man. In that film, Elisabeth Moss is terrorised by an abusive ex-boyfriend who has developed an invisibility technology and, of course, nobody around her takes her fears seriously.
Now Universal, and the cost-conscious but high-value production studio Blumhouse, have reunited with Whannell to have a crack at another of their famous monsters, the Wolf Man - famously played by Lon Chaney Jr. in the original back in 1941.
Finding something new in a world that has had more than its share of werewolves in recent years - I'm personally quite fond of the ridiculous Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols' Wolf from 1994 - is what's required here, and I'm pleased to say that Whannell has made something that's not uninteresting.
Christopher Abbott plays Blake, a struggling writer who parents his daughter Ginger at home while his successful journalist wife Charlotte - played by Julia Garner - focuses on her career. They live in San Francisco - played in this case by Featherston Street in Wellington, but don't worry, that won't distract you for long.
Blake's long-lost father has finally been declared legally dead and now the estate, all the way up in the remote Oregon woods, must be disposed of. Blake suggests a summer vacation - a way for him and Charlotte to rekindle their fading relationship - but it will be all they can do to survive their first night in the wilderness.
Their truck crashes off the road and Blake is bitten on the arm by a mysterious creature. As the evening goes on, he starts to get sicker and sicker.
The infection in the bite seems to be transforming him into some kind of wolf-like creature and one of the things I liked about the film was the way that director Whannell tries to show us that transformation from the victim's point of view.
I once had a terrible flu in which I experienced hallucinations for days and the way that the sickness is presented in the film reminded me very much of that. My hair, fingernails and teeth did not fall out, however, so there's a limit to how useful that story is.
Everyone in the film is pretty much underwritten - Blake doesn't have much to say for himself because he spends so much of the film in various forms of physical deterioration, but we're lucky that Garner has had lots of practice recently fleshing out thinly drawn characters and has become quite adept at it.
I liked Wolf Man - it has modest ambitions and pretty much achieves them. The theme of parenting and its success and failures hold things together nicely and there's a lovely - if that's the right word - call back to Leigh Whannell's 2004 breakout script for Saw which I appreciated.
Wolf Man is rated R16 for graphic violence, horror and gore and is playing in multiplexes across New Zealand now.
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