MOVIE
Werewolf by Night
Director Michael Giacchino
Review Ray Chan
Streaming services currently offer a whole new world of entertainment, enjoyed in the comfort of the home, and certainly that seems to be the direction increasingly taken by many studios.
One of the best employers of this technology is Disney, leveraging it to best advantage, showcasing many series that would be deemed too unconventional and ultimately box-office risks for the big screen.
Examples include the delightful She-Hulk and Captain Marvel, the grim Moon Knight, the Star Wars offshoots and practically everything with Kevin Feige’s stamp on it.
The latest offering, Werewolf By Night, isn’t exactly episodic though, but a standalone film that doesn’t really fit into the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Written by Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron, and directed by composer Michael Giacchino — who also provides the music, naturally — Werewolf focuses solely on the world of this one character, in this one story: a self-contained adventure that deliberately riffs on the production values of a bygone era.
Shot in glorious retro black and white – with odd glimpses of colour to highlight various scenes – the movie reins in various characters from Marvel’s horror comics: Ulysses and Elsa Bloodstone, the Man-Thing, and the titular character, whose origin isn’t revealed. It’s a given assumption that the amusingly and fittingly named Jack Russell turns into a werewolf when the moon is up.
Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the lycanthrope protagonist, a hunter of so-called monsters with more than 100 kills to his name. He is gathering with the crème de la crème of his peers to fight for the Bloodstone, an artifact that helps hunters in their quest to rid the world of the creatures. The irony of course is that Jack is one himself.
He shows up in a dandy outfit with white paint on his face, a nod to his ancestors, he says to his cabal of hunters.
Suave and stylish, he's not as obviously bloodthirsty as the others, who all have a similar fashion nous, from a Kraven the Hunter facsimile with a Scottish accent to a Bowie-esque thin white duke.
But running for just 52 minutes, Werewolf doesn’t take the time to flesh out the assemblage, except for Elsa Bloodstone (Laura Donnelly), who, despite being the rightful heiress to the gem, must fight for it like everyone because she was estranged from her father, the legendary monster hunter Ulysses, at the time of his death.
And you know she means business, because unlike the other foppish fighters, she just wears a designer leather jacket and boots, a literal long cool woman in a black dress.
Everything about Werewolf is a deliberate homage to the early days of Hollywood, from the aforementioned monochromatic cinematography and technicolor flourishes, to the prevalence of practical effects, irises and old-fashioned visual trickery, such as flashing flickers for the gory scenes to Jack’s hirsute transformation depicted in shadow form.
Even Elsa’s mother Verussa carries off a Bride of Frankenstein vibe with white streaks through her hair. One could be forgiven for expecting to see a Marty Feldman-esque manservant, reprising a role from another horror parody, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.
The appearance of Man-Thing will certainly delight Marvel comic aficionados. Originally created as a large, slow-moving, empathic, humanoid swamp critter living in the Florida Everglades, it bears the Bloodstone everyone wants and so becomes the target of the hunters.
It’s a credit to the movie makers that they chose not to veer away from how the mossy mammoth appeared in the comics, with its lumbering vegetation-encrusted form, and branches and trunks on the face.
They even refer to it simply as Ted, a reference to Theodore Sallis, the name of the scientist who became the floral freak after ingesting a serum.
Jack and Elsa end up working together and prove tremendously enjoyable in their respective roles. Bernal plays Jack with a weariness that suggests his dual nature isn’t eroding his humanity so much as it is eroding his faith in it. And Donnelly’s Elsa shows that while she is hardened, she is not invulnerable, convincingly portraying the state of her fragile relationship with her father.
The Disney+ stream offers the perfect place for Marvel to experiment a little with films like this, giving filmmakers like Giacchino, at the start of his directorial career, space to play with fun characters in weird narrative corners that don’t have to support larger stories.
Werewolf By Night is a refreshing combination of the silly and the strange into the MCU. A follow-up would definitely raise the thumbs from this reviewer, and it would be just fittingly off-kilter if Howard the Duck – a resident of the Man-Thing’s other-dimension home – were to make a cameo.
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