A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

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Wolf Man, monsters have never been so boring

Maybe Ryan Gosling was onto something

Wolf Man, monsters have never been so boring Maybe Ryan Gosling was onto something
Wolf Man, monsters have never been so boring Maybe Ryan Gosling was onto something

Ryan Gosling was originally supposed to be the protagonist of the new Wolf Man, a film that is part of Universal’s reconstruction of its monster universe. Lucky for him, he pulled out early. Taking his place is Christopher Abbott, the angular and brooding face of typically independent and murky cinema, though he occasionally ventures into mainstream and brilliant works such as Poor Things!. Gosling’s departure was due to overlapping commitments with other projects, though it allowed him to contribute to the film as an executive producer, given his initial involvement. Now, with the film set to hit theaters - in Italy from January 16 - one wonders if Gosling sensed something that led him to abandon ship before it even set sail.

Wolf Man, monsters have never been so boring Maybe Ryan Gosling was onto something | Image 548744

The idea that Gosling left Wolf Man due to the script conflicts with his name appearing in the film credits, especially since Universal agreed to collaborate with him based on some of his ideas that might have made it into the final screenplay. The director initially set to helm the film, Derek Cianfrance, is a professional Gosling had previously worked with on the traumas of the protagonists in Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. However, in Wolf Man, Cianfrance was eventually replaced by Leigh Whannell, who, in the same year that Gosling presented his vision for modernizing the Wolf Man story, received well-deserved acclaim for his excellent work on another of Universal's reimagined monsters, The Invisible Man. That was 2020, and the story intertwined the horror figure with a narrative focused on stalking and gender-based violence, becoming an engaging reflection on a real societal danger told through the horror genre.

Although the departures of Cianfrance and Gosling did not bode well, it is true that when Whannell took over the reins of the film, he still had enough creative freedom to revise and adapt the story as he saw fit, while potentially retaining the ideas that had appealed to Universal from the previous duo. The director then set to work on the screenplay with his wife, Corbett Tuck, and the result is, unfortunately, history—a bad one. The story follows Blake (Abbott), father to young Ginger (Matilda Firth) and husband to journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner). The not-so-happy family decides to take a trip to reconnect, prompted by the disappearance of Blake’s father, returning to his childhood home in the forests and mountains of Oregon. It’s a chance to escape the city, spend time together, and explore new landscapes. But something terrifying prowls hungrily in the woods surrounding the old house, forcing the family to hide and face one of the most frightening nights of their lives.

If it’s not the legend of the wolf man that impacts the viewer—revised but still based on Curt Siodmak’s original 1941 film—it’s certainly the inexplicable and unbearable stagnation that pervades this new version. A sense of boredom that never evolves, greeting the audience right from the interminable prologue, where attention begins to wane by the second minute. Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man has a soporific effect—an indecipherable spell that is never broken during the brief yet seemingly drawn-out viewing. The excessive stillness forces viewers to notice all the film’s inconsistencies, which fail to merge the themes of fear and the exploration of parental dynamics, central to the narrative. From the start, the story highlights Blake’s relationship with his father but confines it to an anonymous and uninformative opening sequence, made redundant by the plethora of similar stories produced in cinema history.

This is why, when the film shifts to the city and the protagonist’s adulthood, we see him as a caring parent, focused on his daughter’s safety and dedicating his days and attention to her. Protect is the verb that ties the film’s various phases together—the cyclical return of the instinct to defend one’s child, contrasted with Blake’s father’s brusque methods, leading Blake to aim to be the opposite of the parent he had. However, unlike in The Invisible Man, where Whannell skillfully used horror tropes to transcend the genre and explore Elisabeth Moss’s character’s abuse, in Wolf Man, the narrative is so strained that it tears, leaking all over the place. The film evokes such indifference in the audience that one almost overlooks the poor makeup that transforms man into wolf and the failed attempt to depict the differing perceptions of sight and sound between humans and creatures. Perhaps it was indeed a certain sixth sense that told Ryan Gosling to flee—a foresight that everyone else lacked.