Nature is violence. It’s not only the premise of The Wolf Man, but every story tells in various ways its natural to succumb to your natural instincts and to choose violence. Animals kill other animals for food and survival. We tend to forget we are animals too. Stories of humans turning into other animals, or a hybrid of human and animal has been around for centuries. We will always get stories like these but it is still an alluring notion of the possibility to abandon all that makes you human and go with your animalistic instinct. To get rid yourself of morality , or civility and be free of what binds you to be human. 

I wish The Wolf Man directed, and written by Leigh Whannell (the invisible man, Upgrade) kept with this theme of man’s struggle against nature and divulge in the aspect can you still be human and be a Wolf instead it drifts way to a story of patriarchy and toxic parenting. I’m not against a story that inspects those themes, but it is presented with a safe approach that is almost comical that the father in the film says to his daughter “my job is to keep you safe.” almost as if he is saying to the script. A film from a person that was an executive producer of the Saw films I expected more gore, I expected more danger, I expected more violence. I expected less safe writing. Instead they relied on makeup and sound and sound mixing to carry the film, not the characters. 

What makes any Werewolf or Wolf Man story great isn’t showing off with great special effects the physical transformation, but presents also the mental transformation. And that is what this film lacks. I don’t know what going on in the Wolf man’s mind at any time in the film. Is there any trait of humanity in his full transformation? We will never know.  There is a great story in this film somewhere if they kept what they promised in the beginning of the film. Sadly after seeing it, I felt just like a wolf man, hungry for more and never be satisfied.