Wolf Man (2025) – Hairy

Released: 16th January
Seen: 25th April

On May 22nd 2017, Universal announced that it was launching a new franchise that would feature all of their legendary movie monsters in a shared universe. It was intended to culminate in a grand team-up, The Avengers of horror to be combined into a little franchise known as the Dark Universe. Their inaugural movie was 2017’s The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, and it bombed so hard that the Dark Universe as a concept was dead by June 10th (the day after the release). No one wanted to touch this franchise, it had so royally fucked itself that the entire concept of these legendary horror creatures was gone… right up until someone thought to try again but without the gimmick of a team up, just make some good films with these characters.

The first one off the line was The Invisible Man in 2020, which is still one of the best horror films of the last decade. Its writer/director, Leigh Whannell, had managed to modernise the horror legend and make it something special so when the announcement came out that Leigh was going to try it again with Wolf Man, it was hard not to be excited. Now, this isn’t a failure on the level of The Mummy, but it’s not an undeniable legend like Invisible Man either.

Wolf Man begins with our eventual wolfman Blake (Christopher Abbott) getting a letter to inform him that his father has been declared legally dead so he inherits his dad’s old farm house in the middle of nowhere. Figuring this would be a good way to get his family out of the hustle and bustle of city life for a while he packs his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) into a truck along with a bunch of their belongings and heads into the woods. After meeting a few locals and getting a little lost, their trip goes pear shaped when they get into an accident that’s caused by something in the middle of the road… something wolf shaped that just attacked Blake who will spend the rest of the film slowly devolving into the titular monster, in glorious gruesome detail.

Wolf Man really likes to lean on creating an unnerving atmosphere above everything else. Above outright jump scares or gory moments or elements of shock (though it does contain all of those in copious amounts) what it really likes doing is making sure that the view is uncomfortable at all times. From the isolation of the location, making it feel as though no one can ever come to help, to the disturbing way that the transformation impacts one of our main characters, everything going on helps create a feeling that everyone is just doomed and there’s nothing that can be done. It’s a heavy weight that just fills the entire film with dread so even in the few quiet moments where the characters can catch their breath, the audience knows that won’t last long because there’s such an unnerving feeling in the air that it’s impossible to feel comfortable.

Like a lot of horror films, Wolf Man is playing with its main antagonist as a metaphor and this time the one that the filmmakers have admitted they were going for was how it feels to witness someone succumbing to an illness, watching them go from the person you knew and loved to someone completely unrecognisable due to an illness they can’t control. There’s a brutal reality here that works and so many scenes you can see that subtext just become text. Scenes of Blake looking like he’s moments from death on the couch covered in sweat while his family try to figure out how to get him help could come right out of a medical drama and is played completely seriously. Were it not for the title of the movie, you could pass this off as just a film about a general infection and it would still work pretty well.

There’s also a little bit of Wolf Man touching on the cycle of abuse, Blake’s father is clearly presented as being somewhat stern and at least verbally abusive (If not just straight up physically abusive, though that isn’t shown explicitly in the film) and seeing Blake slowly turn into someone just like his father despite his stated desire to not be like that is heartbreaking. It helps us paint a full picture of this man trying to do right by his family despite his prior baggage that has done lasting damage to his mental well-being. It allows us to put a raw painful visual on this cycle that really helps sell some of Wolf Man‘s darker moments, those moments lasting quite a while since this film isn’t just going to transform in a couple of minutes and be done with it. No, you’re going to watch Blake lose his humanity and slowly become the thing he fears for as long as Whannell can hold it in place.

For all there is to praise about his movie, though, the big problem it has is that it feels so slow that it’s possible to really lose interest if you’re not fully engaged in the material. Sure, the idea of the werewolf transformation taking an hour or so is a fascinating one but by the halfway point, it’s hard not to want them to hurry up and get to the part where the wolf goes nuts. That building of unnerving atmosphere I mentioned earlier… note I didn’t say it was raising the tension, because it really doesn’t. There isn’t really any, perhaps because it’s hard to have tension when every man and his dog knows that a film called Wolf Man where someone gets scratched by a mysterious creature in the woods is going to end in a wolf man being made but that lack of tension means it’s easy to just disconnect from the film.

What Wolf Man has in atmosphere and good characters, it lacks in the actual scare department. The moments of horror aren’t as often as you would hope, which is a shame because when they do hit, they hit pretty hard (the gnawing of an arm is just delightfully brutal, but then everyone acts kind of normally in the aftermath so it just doesn’t work) and we know this writer/director can pull off tension and scares well because they’ve done it so many times before. It feels like Wolf Man is holding itself back and not going for its true potential. You can feel the moments where it could really push things and hammer home its ideas or get the heart rate going up from fear, but it just doesn’t.

Wolf Man is still a good movie, pretty much proving that Leigh Whannell really knows his horror stuff and can make an enjoyable film no matter what, but it’s not as good as you can feel it could be. It’s certainly a massive step down from Whannell’s previous work using a Universal Monster. Wolf Man is smart, well-planned and tries something that feels different for the Wolf Man franchise but it just doesn’t have that special thing that pushes it to greatness. It’s fine, it’s an OK time that keeps the Wolf Man alive a little longer. Might not be one that we remember for that long but it’s still enjoyable.