
Movie Reviews
Wolf Man
Leigh Whannell's latest update of a classic Universal Monsters flick is a tepid January horror movie that has more success at making you wince than unsettling you.
Wolf Man (2025)
Wolf Man, the latest addition to the 112-year-old Universal Monsters line, was supposed to star Ryan Gosling, with his Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines director Derek Cianfrance at the helm. Whereas that sounds like a gift of cinema we might unwrap at Christmas or another busy moviegoing season, the Wolf Man we actually get from Universal hails from Saw, Insidious writer and The Invisible Man (2020) director Leigh Whannell and stars Christopher Abbott. While a creative downgrade to be sure, that’s not a pairing without promise. Until you remember that it’s January, a month that in moviegoing has long been associated with dreck.
Whannell’s latest is maybe a bit better than dreck, but it’s no better than his Invisible Man, a horror film that was curiously overpraised and doing solid business right when COVID hit the United States in 2020 and ground the industry and much of the world to a halt.
Wolf Man opens with some screens establishing some folklore in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. There, people have gone missing and some believe they are stricken with something that the natives call “Face of the Wolf.”

Set in 1995, when the phenomenon is believed to have begun, our overlong prologue sees a polite, quiet boy named Blake Lovell (Zac Chandler) going hunting with his short-fused father (Sam Jaeger). They encounter something Dad claims is a bear. Privately, like us, he believes it to be something else. Some kind of…wolf man.
In the present day, that boy is all grown up (now Abbott) with a workaholic wife (Julia Garner, who looks too young to believably play an established career woman) and a kind young daughter named Ginger (Matilda Firth) who has inherited her father’s proclivity for daydreaming. Blake gets notice that his long-missing father has been legally declared dead, prompting a spontaneous trip for the New York family of three to the rural, woodsy hometown where Blake has not been since childhood.
In Oregon, without cell phone signal, the Lovells end up on the property of someone claiming to know Blake’s family. Then, they have a close encounter with something in the middle of the road, an incident that changes all of their lives forever, some more dramatically than others.

Whannell, who shares screenplay credit with his wife, first-time scribe Corbett Tuck, does not really have some great way to make this old horror property resonate with modern audiences. He does a good job of building some tension and he displays a clear preference for physical effects over CGI, which will earn him some credit with seasoned horror heads. But this still ends up a tepid January movie and a slow burn that has more success at making you wince and look away (with gruesome but dramatically hollow body wounds) than at genuinely scaring or unsettling you.
Abbott has gotten where he is with some fine dramatic chops. My critics group nominated a co-star in his little-known but highly-regarded James White back in 2015. In the decade since, Abbott has put in the work to stand out, often in movies that are not widely seen. His credits have grown in stature: he appeared in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-winning Poor Things and the latest Sony Marvel dud Kraven the Hunter. Still, he’s not quite a household name and Wolf Man will do nothing to change that, even if it posts a respectable opening in its Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend debut against expanding Oscar hopefuls and holiday holdovers. Regardless the turnout, you’d be better off seeing Nosferatu again than watching this a first time.
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