The Wolf Man Twist Has Been Done Before — But Never This Well
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Wolf Man, as well as 1941’s The Wolf Man and 2010’s The Wolfman.
To make a Universal Pictures Wolf Man movie, you really only need two things: a werewolf and daddy issues. That goes all the way back to The Wolf Man, the 1941 film that introduced the titular lycanthrope to the Universal monsters lineup. Lon Chaney Jr. starred as Larry Talbot, who reconnects with his estranged father (Claude Rains) when he returns home to Wales to bury his brother, the favored child. When the film was remade as The Wolfman in 2010, Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins took over as Lawrence and Sir John, playing up Lawrence’s role as the prodigal son, driven far from home after being plagued by delusions connected to the death of his mother. In both movies, the younger Talbot is bitten by a werewolf shortly after his return home, with his father — at least initially — protecting him from the townspeople eager to kill the beast.
The new Wolf Man is not a remake but a reboot; on paper, it has little in common with the two films that precede it (to say nothing of the four sequels Chaney made in the ’40s). Christopher Abbott stars as Blake, husband to workaholic journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner) and stay-at-home dad to Ginger (Matilda Firth). When Blake inherits his childhood home in the Oregon woods, he decides to take his city-dwelling family on a getaway to the place he grew up. Just outside the rural farmhouse, a harrowing encounter with a werewolf leaves Blake wounded and the family running for their lives. They may feel safer once they make it inside and barricade the door, but Blake begins to show signs of sickness, slowly (and gruesomely) transforming into the same creature that attacked them.
As in his 2020 The Invisible Man, director and co-writer Leigh Whannell gives the title character a brand-new origin story, with a greater emphasis on the themes that have helped make these Universal monsters so resonant over the decades. His take on The Invisible Man is as much about gaslighting as it is about invisibility, and his Wolf Man explores toxic masculinity — or, more pointedly, the fear that tapping into whatever innate instinct to “man up” and protect your family will turn you into, well, a monster. But as much as the film diverges from the movies that came before it, Whannell’s Wolf Man reveals itself to be another werewolf story with a fraught father-son relationship at its core. The third-act reveal that Blake’s father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), is the werewolf who infected him makes the movie’s thematic underpinning even clearer: The only thing scarier than turning into a werewolf is turning into your father.
Well before the twist, Grady’s presence hovers over Wolf Man. The film begins 30 years in the past, with Grady taking a young Blake (Zac Chandler) hunting. Blake is visibly intimidated by his dad, a dominating force who yells to keep his kid in line. When, in the present day, grown-up Blake learns that his missing father has been declared dead, we learn the two had been estranged since Blake left home. Given that Grady is merely presumed dead, it might feel like a safe assumption that he’ll pop up again — and because the opening scene reveals Grady’s interest in finding the werewolf in the woods, you can also probably guess what’s happened to him. Those suspicions are confirmed when the werewolf who attacked Blake and his family makes it inside the farmhouse. Charlotte stabs the creature in the back, which allows Blake — in the midst of his own transformation — to get the upper hand. He uses his teeth to tear out the werewolf’s throat, at which point he notices a familiar tattoo on the dead monster’s arm, finally recognizing his father.
The most surprising thing about Wolf Man’s twist is not the reveal itself — which is fairly obvious — but the fact that it’s been done before. While 2010’s Joe Johnston–directed The Wolfman roughly follows the plot of the 1941 film, it veers into new terrain when Sir John reveals himself to be the werewolf that infected Lawrence and murdered Lawrence’s mother and brother. After decades of lycanthropy, Sir John is no longer a reluctant killer and has stopped chaining himself up during the full moon, now gleefully slaughtering innocents without a care in the world. Hopkins leans into the psychopathy of the character, making Sir John’s villain monologue and eventual showdown with Lawrence more campy than tragic. However flawed this remake is, though, it lays the groundwork for Whannell’s Wolf Man: Both end up being films about the influence and impact that even estranged fathers can have on their sons.
Ultimately, Wolf Man is more successful at driving this theme home, in large part because The Wolfman merely stumbles into it, more motivated by the thrill of having Hopkins play a bad guy than by an interest in exploring something deeper. In Whannell’s film, Blake’s worry over repeating his father’s mistakes is front and center. When he yells at Ginger for being perilously close to a busy street, he apologizes right away and says that his angry reaction came from fear. He wants to protect his daughter, but he doesn’t want her to be scared of him, the way he felt about his own father. Later, he explains that sometimes in seeking to protect your family, you can become the thing you’re trying to protect them from. None of this is subtle — The Invisible Man wasn’t either — but Whannell is taking advantage of the way horror allows you to literalize anxiety. After being scratched by Grady in werewolf form, Blake turns into his father, or at least the same kind of monster. He can no longer emotionally connect with Ginger; now he’s something that she has to escape.
The endings of The Wolfman and Wolf Man also mirror each other in interesting ways. The Wolfman was already a subversion of the ’41 original, in which Rains’s Sir John unknowingly bludgeons his son to death while Larry is in werewolf form. The 2010 Wolfman turns the tables: Here, Lawrence must kill Sir John before dying himself, shot with a silver bullet by his pseudo-love interest, Gwen (Emily Blunt). In Wolf Man, Blake also has to kill his father, but his redemption is harder to come by. After Grady is dead, Blake pursues and repeatedly attacks his wife and daughter, who spend the last act of the film working to evade him. It’s only at the very end that Blake appears to find a moment of clarity, tapping into whatever humanity remains inside him and seemingly willing Charlotte to shoot him — she does so after Ginger assures her mother that Blake is ready for this to be over.
Wolf Man’s ending is not unlike The Wolfman’s, where Lawrence thanks Gwen for setting him free. There’s an added poignancy to Whannell’s version, though, as Blake’s death comes from his understanding that the best way to protect his family is to no longer be a part of it. There’s a cynical way to read all of this: Blake was doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes, and no amount of thoughtful parenting and open communication could prevent him from turning into a monster. If that was the story Wolf Man wanted to tell, however, the film would not grant him a final moment of grace. While Blake does discover that his father’s influence is harder to escape than he thought — and that he has the capacity to be just as much of a threat as the man he once feared — his self-sacrifice shows his ability to break the cycle. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s not a wholly tragic one, either. The final shot of Charlotte and Ginger surveying the valley before them might even make it hopeful.
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