“Sometimes when you’re a dad, you’re so afraid of your kid getting scarred that you become the one that scars them.”

Though it occasionally dips into comic book movie origin story tropes, Wolf Man is a thrilling, tight re-imagining of George Waggner’s 1941 Universal Pictures horror classic, The Wolf Man. Effective and efficient use of jump-scares, excellent practical makeup effects, enveloping sound design, and one character’s unique, reoccurring POV perspective outweigh the thin characters and their awkward dialogue. Wolf Man gleefully wears its genre inspirations on its sleeve and it is very proud of them. Wolf Man reads as if Aliens, Evil Dead 2, The Fly (1986), and The Lost Boys had a baby that was abandoned in the woods to fend for itself. There are a few moments where that concept kludge clunks, but for the most part, Wolf Man works.

Directed by the talented genre visionary Leigh Whannell and based on a story by Whannell and Corbett Tuck, Wolf Man is a 2025 Universal Pictures film. Christopher Abbott leads a cast including Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Julia Garner, Ben Prendergast, Benedict Hardle, and Zach Chandler.

“If you don’t do what I say, you get hurt.”

Raised by his rigid and obsessive survivalist father Grady (Jaeger) in a farm up in the Oregon hill country, Blake (Abbott) rejects the life prepared for him and instead finds a family on his own terms, marrying world-weary, workaholic journalist Charlotte (Garner) and her precocious pistol of a daughter, Ginger (Firth). Endeavoring to be everything his father isn’t, Blake enthusiastically leaps into the life of a house-husband, putting his own ambitions as an author aside to focus on raising Ginger while Charlotte expends her energies chasing down stories for her paper.

A stack of legal documents are delivered and Blake discovers that Grady has been declared dead and that he has inherited the family compound. Deciding that a change of scenery would do them all some good, Blake convinces Charlotte and Ginger to come along as he returns to his childhood home to deal with the estate.

Straining the rental truck through narrow and winding back roads, the trio finds their trip complicated when their cellphone signals cease and they’re forced to unfold paper maps in order to progress. Distracted by the pile of print, Blake takes his eyes off the road for a second. When he glances back, something is there. Something savage. A man? Blake swerves and loses it, the truck tumbling into the forest rough.

The man, the thing? It chases them, leaping down into the wooded crevasse. Blake sends Charlotte and the child scrambling from the cab first as the man-thing smashes the glass. It makes its way in
clawing at them, catching Blake, and raking across his wrist as he scrambles to escape the rental’s wrecked interior. The family races to Grady’s compound with the roaring, snapping, snarling, stomping creature in their wake. They are barely able to get the doors closed and locked behind them before the beast can run them down. Blake barricades the family in, nailing a bookcase across the frame to further block access to the interior for the brute.

The pair attempt to mollify the panicked Ginger while at the same time, they try to figure out what is going on. Grady had been obsessed with local stories about the hill fever known as The Face of the Wolf. Charlotte notices that Blake is bleeding heavily from a wicked looking wound on his forearm and after locating Grady’s well-stocked first-aid kit, she makes short work of the wound, cleaning and dressing it with skill.

Charlotte and Blake learn why the family home is built like a fortress as time crawls by and the creature prowls the perimeter, testing the defenses. The windows and doors are all secured with steel bars, keeping the beast at bay.

Blake’s condition deteriorates rapidly. His skin swells. Some of his teeth and nails fall out. He begins to lose touch with reality, having episodes where he blankly stares at Ginger and Charlotte because he can’t recognize them. When lucid, he rages at the thing in the woods. Charlotte realizes that she’s got to get her husband help before he degenerates further. They’re locked in with Blake and whatever he’s becoming may be more dangerous than the monster they‘ve locked outside.

Can Blake hold on to hold on to his humanity long enough to protect his loved ones? Can Charlotte keep a clear head in the back-country chaos? Can Ginger tap the deep bonds she’s forged with Blake to help him keep fighting for his family? What is the thing in the woods, and how many more people has it infected? Please see Wolf Man to find out.

“What’s my job?”

“To keep your daughter safe”

Wolf Man
is a very interesting film to look at. Cinematographer Stefan Duscio opens in close-up with an object lesson in the savagery of nature and the call of the wild is never far from the borders of the framed image, often intruding in an idiosyncratic manner. As Blake’s infection progresses and he periodically disassociates, a dolly shot swings the perspective to his point of view, allowing the audience to perceive the world as he does. Suddenly, the oppressive layers of darkness in the forest or basement explode in brilliant waves of light and color. Details beyond a mere mortal’s ken become clear to him. He can see the veins and arteries of his family through their skin and the irises of his companions take on a glowing and otherworldly sheen. It’s a neat trick.

The sound design was a bit grumbly at first but that could’ve been an artifact of the theatre where this reviewer was watching the film. The textures of the audio ambiance are well-woven and hearken back to classic horror films: rusted hinges creak and cry, begging for oil. Wooden floorboards groan like ghosts. Out of the gate, the monster in the woods clomps and rumbles like a galloping stampede of buffalo, and that’s before Blake’s senses become enhanced. The internal sounds of the farmhouse are amplified to him and feet boom like elephant footsteps.

The practical creature and gore effects as well as the jump scares work smoothly with the dark palate of the picture. There is one scene where this reviewer thought the scare is telegraphed in advance with a jump obviously coming next and another where the performer is faintly visible moving to his mark before his cue, and yet they are still startling. The wolf-prosthesis is unusual and decidedly un-canine but the final transformational sequences are memorably unsettling. While there is a great deal of blood puddles, blood dripping and bloody vomit (possibly a nod to Sam Raimi), there is a scene that is absolutely in need of arterial spurting. Sadly, none is forthcoming.

Christopher Abbott makes for a wonderful Brundlefly. He starts the film full of life and charm and hope. As Blake’s humanity slowly slices itself away, Abbott turns inward, fascinated by the turn his body is taking. If he had mason jars handy, this reviewer is certain he would have stored his sloughed-off pieces and parts. As the film progresses, he takes on a largely mute role. Impressively, in this state, he is able to connect emotionally with the other characters and more importantly, the audience.

Julia Garner has basically two modes for Charlotte. Her character is either envious of the relationship Blake has swiftly forged with Ginger while she has been hunting bylines or she’s terrified, quivering in fear of the thing in the forest or in fear of what the future holds for her husband and whether he will try to eat her or Ginger. As things ramp up, and the action scenes require her agency, it as if a switch is flipped and Garner’s affect flattens to something akin to a Kabuki mask. A line of dialogue a quarter of the way into the running time announces that she’s “tough” with no context given. Early on, she makes no real attempt to secure the household, rather stands there passively as Blake runs about, moving bookcases. When the plot requires it, that switch trips and she’s suddenly mechanically inclined enough to methodically bring a long-dormant pickup back to life. She can repair and run a radio. She knows her way around firearms, able to handle Grady’s modified long gun with ease. The problem is, there’s nothing in the story that supports this knowledge. There is also no real attempt made by Charlotte to emotionally embrace Ginger though it is explicitly stated as one of her character’s goals. Charlotte is no Ellen Ripley.

However, Matilda Firth’s Ginger makes an EXCELLENT Newt.  She’s clever. She’s perceptive and largely brave. She knows her parents relationship is troubled before they even depart to Oregon. Firth lets Ginger’s conflicted feelings and later her fright, play across her expressive face, using nostril flares and a furrowed brow to great effect. She has good comedic timing in the few lighter moments the film provides and the work she puts in alongside Abbott creating believable chemistry early on in the picture pays off when she attempts to connect and communicate with him during the descent of Blake’s transformation.

Towards the end of Wolf Man, there is a wink and nod at Frank Herbert’s Dune: When caught in a trap, Blake totally fails the Wolf Man version of the Gom Jabbar test for Humanity. In one of the final moments, there are parallels to the climax of The Lost Boys. The cabin in the woods has become such a horror cliché that the 2011 film directed by Drew Goddard called The Cabin in the Woods, deconstructed the trope and locking oneself in a cabin in the woods with possessed people was one of the major plot points of Sam Raimi’s seminal 1987 classic, Evil Dead II.

Wolf Man
is a mostly successful attempt at bringing the Lycanthropic mythology into the modern era and grounding it in a modicum of gritty reality. It is well-shot, well-acted, and well-directed. The “Wolf-cam” is a great idea. The creature designs may put off purists, but it is a new take on a (very) old motif. The ending is rather abrupt and this reviewer thinks the implications of a hill fever need to be explored further, perhaps being the conceit that ties a new set of Dark Universe pictures together if Universal decides to pick up the ball and run with it (again). Wolf Man isn’t reinventing the wheel but is an engaging ride.

Wolf Man is in theatres 1/17/25

By Dan Kleiner

Dan Kleiner is a strange visitor from another planet who resides in Brooklyn, New York with two cats and his amazing girlfriend. When not plotting world domination, he spends a great deal of his time watching movies and anime of all sorts, reading comic-books and book-books, studying politics and history and striving for the day when he graduates as a Class A-Weirdo.