This film is howler in more ways than one

Wolf Man is so bad it is unintentionally funny, which is a shame given filmmaker Leigh Whannell is an established talent.

From left, Charlotte (Julia Garner), Ginger (Matilda Firth) and Blake (Christopher Abbott) in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell.

Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell made his name writing scripts for compatriot and horror movie master, James Wan, starting with the 2004 cult hit Saw. He then moved into the director’s chair, including for the impressive 2020 adaptation of HG Wells’s The Invisible Man.

I start with this positive background because his new film, Wolf Man, is a howler. The script, by Whannell and his actor-screenwriter wife Corbett Tuck, is saccharine. The acting, including by the usually great Julia Garner, is worse than phone-it-in. The tension is non-existent. The twists are telegraphed.

Here’s a scene that sums it up. Charlotte (Garner) and her husband Blake (Christopher Abbott) are in the same room. He starts eating his own arm. She looks at him as though he’s doing something mildly inconvenient.

This was when my 19-year-old co-viewer and I relaxed into the idea we were watching an unintentional comedy. As the paper-thin plot progressed and Garner remained moderately miffed, we laughed to the point of tears.

This film, shot in New Zealand, is Universal Studio’s second reboot of the 1941 horror move The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr, following the 2010 flop Wolf Man, starring Benicio Del Toro.

The set up is the same but with different locations. Blake, Charlotte and their pre-teen ­daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) move from San Francisco to rural Oregon after Blake inherits his father’s farm.

They encounter a human-like beast that savages the arm of Blake, who soon takes a lupine turn.

The rest of the film is the threat of the wolf man outside the farmhouse and of the one developing on the premises.

At the screening I attended Whannell said he wanted to treat lycanthropy as a degenerative illness such as Alzheimer’s. So a loved one becomes someone else.

It’s a good idea but when it happens on screen – Blake, fangs out, and Charlotte, deader than deadpan, looking into each other’s eyes – it is embarrassing.

I appreciate Whannell’s willingness to think outside the box, as he did with intelligence in The Invisible Man, but it just doesn’t work, except in a comic sense, in this badly-scripted, poorly-acted film.

He might have been better off making an old-fashioned werewolf film with a full moon, howling, hirsutism and silver bullets.

Wolf Man (MA15+)

103 minutes
In cinemas

★★