Wolf Man (2025) – Review

What is there left to be done with werewolves that hasn’t already been attempted? Ever since a depressed Lon Chaney Jr. came a cropper after an attack of the fuzzies back in the forties, filmmakers have been twisting and contorting lycanthropic lore in order to come up with something new that’s thrown in everything from iconic horror/comedies to allegories about puberty to even whodunits where you have to guess the identity of the skinwalker before the denouement hit.
Bottom line? New takes seem to be getting thin on the ground, but if anyone has a shot at teaching an old wolf new tricks it’s Leigh Whannel who most recently gave transparent psychos a toxic masculinity upgrade with 2020s The Invisible Man.
Seeing as both the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man are both, old Universal Monsters stable mates, it seems like Whannel is the perfect choice to try and update yet another classic creature using modern tropes, but will lycanthropy lend itself to the director’s ideas as well as an invisible nutter did?

After discovering that his missing father has now been officially declared dead, stalled writer Blake Lovell has decided to relocate his family to his remote childhood home located in the remote mountains of Oregon in order to try and salvage his struggling marriage. Why on earth would anyone do this in a world where The Shining is readily available to stream or buy? Because Blake has some generational drama to process due to an over protective, short tempered patriarch and he’s found himself slipping into those same bad habits with his daughter, Ginger and his wife, Charlotte. Their journey to their new home is uneventful, but not long after arriving they get into a serious accident when Blake swerves their moving van off the road when a bestial, but human looking figure suddenly appears in the middle of the road. During the carnage, a clawed hand manages to rake Blake’s arm, but the family manage to get to their new family home and lock whatever this fucking cryptid is outside.
From there, the unit try to batten down the hatches despite having minimal survival skills, but as this snarling creature stalks them from outside the house, Blake discovers some odd changes are afflicting him as if he’s caught some super fast acting virus that’s targeting his senses. Soon, his hearing has become so sensitive, he’s unable to distinguish the voices of his loved ones from the wall of other noices his ears are picking up and worse yet, his eyes are becoming so sensitive to light, the dark has starting to become as bright as day, but the faces of Ginger and Charlotte are becoming a blur.

Rendered mute by the sickness coursing through his rapidly changing body, it turns out that he’s been targeted by a virus traditionally known as The Wolf’s Face that’s regressing him into a lupine state at a worrying speed. Will this man who has always worked to protect his family become the biggest threat to their lives imaginable.
In his last couple of movies, Leigh Whannel has managed to get himself known as a filmmaker who enjoys putting bold new spins on classic concepts with such hugely radical films such as Upgrade and The Invisible Man and Wolf Man isn’t much different. Going down the usual Blumhouse route, the director weaves themes such as generational trauma, physical and mental degeneration due to illness and the notion of city folk floundering around in the deep dark woods while nature sharpens their claws – but somewhat disappointingly, Whannel fails to get any of these concepts to line up in any way that managed to dig its fangs in in any affecting way. Separately, each one works just fine. The film initially goes hard on the whole fact that we’re all somewhat fucked up by our parents and the best we can hope to do is not to fuck up our own kids in return with Christopher Abbott doing a fine job as a man struggling with his own rage issues, but the film sort of forgets to follow this up once the boo-boo on his forearm starts to alter his very DNA.

From here, Whannel leans more into body horror as the transformation into a wolf-like creature is a more gradual change rather than a quick one and it could either be best explained away as either The Fly with fur or what would happen if the transformation from The Howling took seven hours instead three minutes. It’s here that Wolf Man manages to do its best stuff as Whannel channels his talent for memorably jarring visuals as he doubles down on putting us in the shoes of a man literally losing his humanity. The sound design is magnificent, with Blake at one moment running around the house looking for a loud banging sound only to find that it’s the sound of a spider’s legs as it climbs up a wall; but beyond that, the woods become an audible ocean of creaks a swooshes and the fact he can’t understand human dialogue any more because of it is a nice and heartbreaking choice to help divorce him from his human side. Similarly, the moments that deal with Blake’s truly funky wolf-vision is a legitimately fantastic idea that brings an entirely new wrinkle to a well worn tale  especially when most POV shots in werewolf movies are, as standard, usually a bit cheesy and totally crap. Finally, the whole cat and mouse shit in and around the house in the woods is of a high standard with Whannel employing the same tension and explosive jump scares as a velociraptor setpiece from a Jurassic Park movie.
However, somehow, it all doesn’t seem to hang together as a satisfactory whole and as a result, Julia Garner’s Charlotte feels strangely underwritten from a man who gave Elizabeth Moss so much to play with in The Invisible Man. There’s a sense that there might of been (or should be) a sub-plot that as the main bread winner of the family, Charlotte was feeling like her relationship with her daughter wasn’t anywhere near as string as her husband’s, but once Blake’s transformation has gone so far, the characters isn’t given that chance to go full warrior mother such as Ellen Ripley or Emily Blunt from A Quiet Place.
Still, I have to say, I appreciated the attempt more than the result and Wolf Man manages to gouge more positive claw marks than negative and although those who are hoping for a full, Rick Baker style transformation and a lupine final form may be a bit disappointed – the movie is called Wolf Man and therefore riffs more on the classic, 1941 notion on the creature being a blend of the two forms rather than a fully, monstrous form.

For a director as visually ambitious and creative as Whannell, Wolf Man can only be seen as something of a disappointment, however, he still incudes enough fantastic touches to make it a film well worth watching. However, for a film about a gradual transformation, Wolf Man is noticeably unsure what it’s final form should actually take.
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