Wolf Man (2025) Review

Wolf Man (2025) Review

 

After his success with The Invisible Man—the first quantifiable “win” for a Universal horror movie in, well, forever—writer/director Leigh Whannell was handed The Wolf Man to reboot next, a character that had languished in development hell for nearly a decade. I saw it in the same movie theatre with the same friend as I saw Joe Johnston’s 2010 remake, and we were both prepared for a different interpretation of the classic werewolf story this time, though still had fond memories of that more lurid, violent take. Whannell went for a far more simplified version. In fact, it ended up being too simplified.

The origins of the werewolf are transposed to the woods of Oregon in modern day. A boy and his intense father encounter the creature while on a hunt. The film opens strong, with a great sense of tension and no clear look at what is stalking them. Then, it jumps ahead to the boy grown up, and he packs up a moving truck along with his wife and daughter and heads back to the remote homestead he grew up on, but along the way, they nearly hit an upright creature on a backroad, and it results in a crash. The father is attacked before they can escape the wreckage, then they run to the old house and barricade themselves inside with the creature lurking out in the yard. It’s not a spoiler to say this is where the rest of the movie remains: with the family, in the house, throughout the single night they are stuck there, with the father slowly undergoing monstrous changes.

I wasn’t surprised that Wolf Man leaned more into a disease-kind of lycanthropy than a spiritual or supernatural one, given the more technical approach taken to Invisible Man. It goes for gruelling, grossout body horror, but unfortunately, the premise strands it in very familiar territory. I found the attempt to pare down the concept admirable, but ultimately unsatisfying. There’s no mystery as to how it’s all going to play out; I preferred the 2010 remake because it went for a broader pedigree of entertainment in a period-piece horror retelling, but this version is meant to be taken completely seriously. The family is likable enough, but once the father starts to turn, the movie begins to go downhill and grow more tedious. There are neat moments along the way, though, such as when we see from his perspective that a spider’s steps are as loud as human steps, and he can’t understand what his wife is saying because he’s becoming more animalistic, but these moments become fewer the more wolf-like he becomes.

The physical appearance of the werewolf is more akin to Jack Nicholson in Wolf than it is the classic Wolf Man, which is okay, but I prefer my werewolves a little hairier. Christopher Abbott does a good job in the role, though isn’t extremely sympathetic, but it’s less about his performance and more about the script. When it gets to what feels like its inevitable conclusion, it tries to be overtly tragic, but doesn’t quite stick the landing. I won’t fault it for having familiar themes of generational trauma and illness paranoia, but a big part of the problem is the overly simple narrative doesn’t really lend to giving the story something new to say, which there was clear intent to do. Visually, the daytime exterior cinematography is crisp and enthralling, but most of the nighttime interior shots are too dark and flat, which makes up the majority of the runtime, unfortunately. With such a basic concept, the werewolf horror and action also becomes limited, and again, is not that creative or scary.

Wolf Man is a mixed bag, but in the end, I would just say it is middling, and unlikely to be one I’d want to revisit anytime soon. Some of the new ideas work quite well, the acting is good (Julia Garner is three-for-three with her performances this year, after Fantastic Four: First Steps and Weapons), and the attempts to set it apart from other werewolf films do accomplish that goal at times, but it lacks anything truly unique or memorable largely because of how scaled back it is. If anything, it’s a good reminder that single location horror movies are harder to pull off than the best ones out there make it seem.