Blending the classic werewolf myth with the chilling allegory of a terminal illness, the new film explores the devastating consequences of a primal transformation. Christopher Abbott delivers a nuanced performance as Blake, a man grappling with his own inner demons as he faces a monstrous fate.
Inside every man lies a beast, waiting to be unleashed — that’s the central conceit behind most werewolf movies, be they horrifying. Sometimes this full-moon fever is seen as liberating. Other times it’s a painful affliction. Rarely is it subtext. And since the gory glory days of 1980s, artists like Rob Bottin and Rick Baker have turned those lupine transformation scenes into special-effects showstoppers. Next to their creature-of-the-night cousins, a.k.a.
vampires, werewolves have been one of the genre’s safest bets. What’s more terrifying than losing control of your physical and mental self as your most primal, animalistic instincts take the wheel? Recognizes that, inner conflicts or not, all werewolf horror is essentially hairier-than-usual body horror. Except this time, you get to see its hapless hero’s metamorphosis happen in fits and starts rather than one fell swoop — all the better to push a very specific metaphor, my dear. Like the director’s extraordinary version of (2020), this take on the curse that can even affect men who are pure by heart and say their prayers at night is not a remake of the original Universal monster movie. Unlike his earlier film, which wore its social commentary extremely visibly on its sleeve, there’s little bigger-picture nudging and winking here. Though an extended preamble does, however, make you think you’re in for an unpacking of how masculinity acts as its own interior ravager: A boy named Blake (Zac Chandler) is being raised in the woods of Central Oregon by his father (Sam Jaeger), an ex-Marine and survivalist whose protectiveness of his boy borders on abusive. To be fair, there’s a hitchhiker roaming the land that’s rumored to suffer from what the area’s indigenous folk call “the face of the wolf.” You sympathize with Dad’s concern for his kin’s safety. Cut to 30 years later, and the now-grown Blake (Christopher Abbott) is displaying some of those same aggressively paternal patterns regarding his own daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). The love he has for his kid is genuine, and you can tell they’re extremely close. But Blake has inherited his old man’s anger issues, which he’s trying to deal with. And that temper may be what’s causing friction between him and his wife, Charlotte (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). The fact that she works as a journalist and he’s a writer in between gigs isn’t making the vibe in their modest San Francisco apartment any less tense. So when a letter arrives saying that Blake’s father, long listed as missing, has finally been declared deceased, he comes up with an idea. He’s got to drive up to Oregon and clean out his dad’s place. Why don’t Charlotte and Ginger join him? They can have some much-needed time together. It’s all fun and games and family bonding until they arrive at Blake’s old stomping grounds, and he can’t find the house. A creepy local hunter (Benedict Hardie) offers to help out, since it’s getting dark and they shouldn’t be out after the sun goes down. Long story short, they encounter a rather wolf-like gent, Blake gets scratched by this predator’s claws, and shit gets literally hairy. The film then turns into a waiting game: How much time do they have before the man sworn to protect his family from harm turns into the thing that will hurt the most? Something evil may be stalking around outside, but what about the ever-growing threat inside the house? And what happens when you’re forced to watch a loved one morph into something else entirely? Whannell has said that he wanted to treat the werewolf aspect as an allegory for observing the deterioration that accompanies terminal diseases, and quicker than you can say Susan Sontag, this illness-as-metaphor notion becomes the defining idea behind his entry into the canon. Abbott, to his credit, plays up the gradual devolution into a confused, carnivorous hybrid with more nuance than you’d think, letting us see how each new change (enhanced senses, an increasing inability to speak or understand English, shedding his old teeth for sharper dental work) doubles as a loss of humanity. You know how wolves will chew off their own leg if caught in a trap? Let’s just say that such self-harm extends to hunger pangs as well. Most of the psychological handwringing is thus offloaded to Garner, who proves that her terrified facial expressions are truly top shelf, and the switch of perspectives is an interesting pivot from the usual how-do-I-tame-my-inner-predator bluster. There’s no taming this monster who now stands where a husband and father once stood; his family can only stand by and witness him fall apart and eventually beg for death. The closest analogy to what Whannell is trying to do here isn’t a werewolf movie so much as David Cronenberg’s (1986), which turned a ’50s B-movie into a gory, gooey interpretation of the havoc disease wreaks on those suffering from both sides of the hospital bed. You can see the movie aiming for that landmark’s mix of body horror, pathos, tension and tragedy
Werewolf Horror Body Horror Transformation Psychological Thriller Allegory Illness Family Monster
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