Dracula. Frankenstein’s monster. Harvey Weinstein. Terrifying monsters from movies who have continued to find new ways to scare us since their inception long ago. And that’s exactly what 2025 is trying to do to ring in the new year with Wolf Man, a modernized take on the Universal classic about the man who is also a wolf. Whether it be through the 1940s Lon Chaney picture or the 2010 reboot, you’re probably at least familiar with the concept of a werewolf. Yes, we’ll accept Twilight as well, there’s no judgement here. 

So I was actually pretty curious to see this film considering director Leigh Whannell’s last film was 2020’s The Invisible Man. This was a film that took another classic Universal monster and modernized to better reflect modern fears and paranoias. While it’s not perfect, I respected the swings he took to make the iconic concept hit a little closer to home.

And you know what, he attempts the same kind of approach with Wolf Man, tying the horrendous process of slowly turning into a monster with the inheriting of family trauma and the drive to be the one to break that chain for your own children. He attempted that, at least. Wolf Man doesn’t exactly stick the landing as gracefully with its metaphors this time around, which isn’t the end of the world as long as the film at least delivers on some monstrous fun. Unfortunately, that isn’t really the case here. While I think it starts off pretty strong, the film eventually becomes a slog that seems to lose sight of bringing its themes full circle, instead focusing on lackluster scares in its poorly lit setting. There’s some good ideas here, but the eternal theme of wrestling with the beast inside is possibly the weakest link.

So the film follows a family relocating to the husband’s late father’s farm, but a terrible accident caused by some bipedal monster forces them to take shelter in the old farmhouse. But the husband begins to slowly lose himself, having been infected by a disease that quickly aims to do a bit more than put a little hair on his chest.

I think this film starts out pretty great, really setting a solid, ominous tone. A small hunting trip between father and son quickly grows incredibly tense, and while there’s no huge payoff, it gets things moving in the right direction. But unfortunately, I think the film struggles to maintain that tension as it goes on. Once they make it into the house, things get pretty slow and repetitive, not exactly making the best use of such a claustrophobic space. A lot of the horror from there comes from the metamorphosis of the father into the wolfman. It can be pretty gross at times, but also feels like a far cry from the brutality of something like An American Werewolf in London. The transformation is more of a slowly building sickness rather than an agonizing shift into a beast, so you get a few teeth falling out here and a little bit of arm skin being gnawed off there. A pretty interesting addition is the separation between how the infected father and the rest of the family see the world. When we’re in the dad’s POV, the world glows a haunting blueish green and he’s no longer able to understand his family, which is a truly frightening idea. But the final look for the wolfman isn’t anything all that crazy or interesting. Sorry furries, but he’s way more man than wolf in this one.

So, the way the wolf man stuff works is that it needs to be passed from one recipient to another. In this case, our protagonist Blake is scratched by another wolfman and slowly begins to change. As he changes, he loses more and more of himself until he’s all monster. This connects to his harsh upbringing with his militant father, and how those temper issues slowly begin to take root in Blake as an adult, which strains his own relationship with his wife and daughter. I think that’s a pretty solid take on this type of story, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t come together completely. This is shown through Blake just being harsh one or two times, and you never really believe it’s as big of an issue as the film wants you to think. Once Blake is mostly through his transformation, the story shifts to being more from his wife Charlotte’s point of view, which means we end up losing that internal struggle he’s facing. Charlotte actually ends up getting more to do in the film this way, but the film doesn’t follow through with her own internal dilemma established early on. She expresses fear that she’s lost her relationship with her daughter because of how much she works, but their actual relationship is hardly given any development or even acknowledgement. This leaves someone as talented as Julia Garner without much character to work with. And since we are no longer seeing the world primarily through the eyes of Blake, his connection to the point the film is trying to make feels nonexistent, as he loses the agency to even wrestle with it. 

But you probably want to know if it’s scary or not. In my opinion, it’s scariest when it’s slowly building dread, creeping up on you and getting under your skin with some admittedly effective sound design. When it becomes more of a creature flick, it loses a lot of its scariness in my opinion. You get a little bit of wolfman on wolfman action, but it’s so quick and unfocused that I’d hardly consider it a fun time. The climax essentially becomes a game of cat and mouse around the farm that could have been pretty heart pumping; there’s just one problem. You can’t see a goddamn thing that’s happening. By far my biggest complaint with this film is how it handles darkness, and since most of the story takes place in the middle of the night, that’s a good chunk of this film. These scenes of complete darkness are borderline incomprehensible. There’s a whole sequence in a barn where I couldn’t tell who was where and what was being done. In this annoying trend of modern films trying to capture authentic darkness, they’ve completely shrouded their film in a dark void to the point where you could close your eyes and see just about as much. I know darkness is used to hide imperfections, but the setting? The characters? Little actions that weigh heavily on the plot? Don’t you want people to see those? Look at Nosferatu! That film is dark as hell, but it’s stylized and colored in a way that when you’re meant to see something…you can actually see it! What a concept! What was I talking about? Oh yeah, sure. It’s a little scary at first but not really by the end.

Wolf Man is not a complete and total waste though. I do think the dread and slowly building anxiety of the situation can be pretty effective, and there’s a halfway decent attempt at connecting a pretty basic horror setup to a very real anxiety about inheriting the worst parts of our upbringing. But outside of that, you’re not going to find too much to get excited for. Lacking in both the charm to make this a bit of fun or the emotional maturity to really make this resonate, Wolf Man spends its slower moments failing to tap into the man, while the more high octane moments never really let the wolf run crazy. And Jesus, the visual style is at best competent and at worst unseeable. Even with all these complaints, it’s still one of the better Blumhouse movies to come out in a hot minute, so there’s a little victory for ya. But I’m willing to let Whannel give it another crack. I’m looking forward to seeing how he ties The Creature From the Black Lagoon to the horrors of motherhood, or something like that.

RATING