Wolf Man (2025)

A decent enough blend of jump scares and body horror, but unfortunately Wolf Man lacks the bite that writer/director Leigh Whannell’s previous film (The Invisible Man) had.

Premise:  Returning to his childhood home in the remote mountains of Oregon to clear out his deceased father’s belongings, stay-at-home dad Blake (Christopher Abbott) brings his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their daughter Ginger with him in the hope that some time away from the city will help them repair their marriage.  But when they are attacked by a humanoid creature in the woods, the family soon find themselves fighting for survival.

Review:

I don’t want to give the impression that Wolf Man is a bad film, it’s just that I can’t help but compare it to writer/director Leigh Whannell’s previous film, which was the unexpected masterpiece that was 2020’s The Invisible Man (which I loved so much it was my Film of the Year for 2020).  Wolf Man isn’t nearly as good as The Invisible Man – but equally, Leigh Whannell clearly isn’t interested in just making the same film again but with a different “classic monster”, as Wolf Man is deliberately different from The Invisible Man in almost every way imaginable.

But even judged on its own merits, Wolf Man is an odd approach to the source material, insofar as it’s not really about werewolves or established werewolf lore at all.  There’s no changing back and forth, no curse of the full moon, no silver bullets and (to be honest) the monster doesn’t really look anything like a “wolf man” either.  Instead, Wolf Man feels like it has more in common with David Cronenberg’s 1986 classic The Fly, given that it focuses on an individual’s slow but irreversible mental and physical deterioration as he permanently and painfully transforms into something unhuman.

“…a little underwhelming for audiences expecting to see a ‘wolf man’ in a film called ‘Wolf Man’…”

Like The Fly, there’s plenty of body horror in Wolf Man as the transformation progresses during the course of the film, but Leigh Whannell seems so determined to distance this film from traditional werewolf lore (it’s really more about a hitherto undiscovered virus/infection than it is about anything remotely supernatural) that the end result feels a little underwhelming for audiences expecting to see a “wolf man” in a film called Wolf Man.

For me, the subtext also didn’t hit home nearly as effectively as it did in The Invisible Man – whereas that film masterfully dealt with issues like domestic violence, coercive control, psychological abuse and gaslighting, Wolf Man wants to draw parallels between the character’s transformation and themes like dealing with a family member’s degenerative disease, a marital breakdown, and generational trauma.  Although the film deserves some credit for trying to add some real depth to its subject matter, none of it really hit home that effectively.

“…evocatively captures the feeling of complete isolation…”

Part of that may be due to the structure – and here I’m going to have to go into a slight “spoiler” (if you can call it that, as it’s a plot point that’s in all the marketing material).  Still here?  Good.  So the focus of the first half of the film is squarely on Blake (Christopher Abbott) and his relationship with his daughter, Ginger, and how that has been affected by the strained relationship that Blake had with his father (which we see in an extended prelude that opens the film).  By the halfway point of the film, the audience has a pretty good impression of Blake’s character – but then when he’s infected by the creature in the woods and he starts to transform, the Blake that we got to know very quickly disappears.

Now this is no doubt (at least in part) intentional, given that one of the themes of the film is what it’s like to see a degenerative disease take away everything you recognise in a loved one until they become a stranger to you – but the problem here is, we then don’t have any other fully fleshed out character to latch on to in Blake’s place.  Julia Garner does the best she can with the material she has to work with as Charlotte (Blake’s wife and Ginger’s mother), but her character is barely developed at all in the first half of the film because the focus is so squarely on Blake.  At the halfway point, the focus of the movie shifts entirely to Charlotte’s perspective, but by that stage Charlotte is effectively in ‘survival mode’, and so we still don’t get much of an insight into her character despite her becoming the primary protagonist of the second half.

“…very inventive ways in which the symptoms of the transformation are explored…”

All of this is why Wolf Man isn’t nearly as engaging a film as The Invisible Man was (or even as engaging as Leigh Whannell’s film before that, Upgrade, was) – but the film still does have plenty of positives.  Viewed as a traditional ‘cabin in the woods’ style horror, it evocatively captures the feeling of complete isolation in the remote Oregon forest, and it provides plenty of effective jump scares throughout.  There are also some very inventive ways in which Leigh Whannell explores some of the symptoms of Blake’s transformation, such as seeing things from his perspective when he develops a form of night-vision but at the same time develops a form of aphasia which prevents him from understanding what’s being said to him.

In the end, although I was disappointed that Wolf Man wasn’t nearly as good as The Invisible Man, I’m still glad I watched it – despite all its flaws, it’s still a tense and immersive horror film that has some interesting elements, even if as a whole some may find it a tad underwhelming.