Like father, like son in a grim and severe horror remake – Solar Sentinel

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Followers of “SCTV” might keep in mind a “Monster Chiller Horror Theatre” episode by which Joe Flaherty’s late-night host, Rely Floyd, mistakenly applications a made-up Ingmar Bergman movie, “Whispers of the Wolf,” pondering it’s a easy werewolf image as an alternative of a moody, existential mashup of Bergman’s “Hour of the Wolf” and “Persona.”

The brand new “Wolf Man” from Common Footage and co-writer/director Leigh Whannell might likewise provoke some puzzled Rely Floyd-esque appears of confusion amongst horror followers. Not that it’s a failure or a joke. Whannell, whose bracing, sharp-edged 2020 remake of “The Invisible Man” ushered us into the cold-creeps COVID period, makes style movies for a large viewers, adults included. He doesn’t play these Common franchise reboots for kicks.

In “Wolf Man,” he actually doesn’t. The outcomes are equal elements marital disaster, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral physique horror. They’re additionally a little bit of a plod — particularly within the second half, when no matter sort of horror movie you’re making shouldn’t, you already know, plod.

The primary half is artful, affected person and deceptively good. A Nineties prologue introduces younger Blake (Christopher Abbott) and his surly father, venturing right into a distant nook of the Oregon woods (New Zealand portrays Oregon) on a searching expedition. They stay close by; Blake has but to listen to concerning the rumored “face of the wolf” creature sharing the identical woods that First Nation tribes have feared for hundreds of years. Defending his son in a shrewdly staged assault, the daddy disappears into the woods, presumed lifeless.

Thirty years later in present-day San Francisco, Blake is an unemployed author and full-time caregiver, married to workaholic journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner). She’s stress incarnate, envious of her husband’s shut emotional bond with their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). With the arrival of his long-missing father’s dying certificates, Blake inherits the agricultural Oregon home. For the sake of the troubled household, Charlotte agrees to spend a while with Ginger on this place.

From there, the film narrows its geographic parameters, remodeling right into a close-quarters drama of three folks in an previous darkish home, surrounded by a lot of shrewdly designed sounds and beset by a werewolf stalking the guests prefer it means enterprise. As soon as Blake suffers a flesh wound by the hands of this predator, Whannell’s devotion to, amongst different movies, David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” turns into obvious.  “Wolf Man” delves into the fractured psyche and grotesque bodily disintegration of a person stricken with an animal-borne virus, fearful of what it’s doing to him and what he might find yourself doing to these he loves. In different phrases, it’s a film about each indignity an unemployed author should endure, lycanthropy included.

Even when her character takes a extra pressing position on this airtight story, the superb Garner doesn’t have a lot to play exterior a parade of slow-roll nonverbal pictures of Charlotte peering this manner and that, taking cost of a quickly dissolving state of affairs however by no means actually getting her due. (The script is by Whannell and his associate Corbett Tuck.) “Wolf Man’s” seriousness is heavy going. Its leitmotif sticks, doggedly, to the thought of transmutable, unholy fears, and sins of the fathers, transmitted like a virus down the household line. A uncommon in-joke pops up on the aspect of the transferring van Blake rents to filter his father’s home: The corporate has been in enterprise since 1941, the slogan notes, taking us again to the yr Common made hay with Lon Chaney Jr. in “The Wolf Man.”

That was neither the primary nor the final werewolf film. This one, initially slated for Ryan Gosling and director Derek Cianfrance, goes about its enterprise with a solemn air, even when it’s super-blechy and Abbott is chewing on his personal forearm for apparent causes: an unemployed author’s gotta eat.

“Wolf Man” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA ranking: R (for bloody violent content material, grisly pictures and a few language)

Working time: 1:43

How one can watch: Premieres in theaters Jan. 17

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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