A Constant Visual Feast

Given the hyper-political bent Leigh Whannell took in 2020 with his Invisible Man update, I’m not at all surprised that Wolf Man, currently his second update for Blumhouse on Universal’s classic monsters, is political to its core, too. But here’s the thing: its politics are Not Good*.

That’s okay, really, because art is…well, art. It isn’t an essay or a classroom lecture. It’s okay for your politics to get messy in your art. But Wolf Man sets out to be one thing, then decides to shift gears and be about something else, casting off the original brief by dumping the task of resolving its conflict to its women, which I frankly think says a lot about how the film and Whannell consider “toxic masculinity” and abuse as two major issues that demand address. (Note: in your new age werewolf movie where the “real monster” is Male Anger, Actually, please do not do the lazy and obvious thing and leave it up to a mother and her daughter to be the ones to deal with it. We’re talking about “female problems” in the strict sense that they impact women and girls, but “male problems” in the sense that they are problems for men to fix**. The backwardness of this movie is not only appalling, but just plain old dull.)

You can read my full review over at Paste Magazine.

*Personally, I think The Invisible Man aggressively dovetails its theme with its politics, to the effect where I feel like it’s punching way above its weight class, but at least the movie is fun to watch and makes good use of dead space for creating tension.
**And you can take that from me as a man who is in a couple of very different forms of therapy working on his own “stuff” in these departments.