Wolf Man film poster and movie review

Movie Reviews

Wolf Man

Reviewed by:
Luke Bonanno on January 16, 2025

Theatrical Release:
January 17, 2025

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.

Running Time103 min

RatingR

Running Time 103 min

RatingR

Leigh Whannell

Leigh Whannell, Corbett Tuck

Christopher Abbott (Blake Lovell / Wolf Man), Julia Garner (Charlotte Lovell), Matilda Firth (Ginger Lovell), Sam Jaeger (Grady Lovell), Ben Prendergast Benedict Hardie Zac Chandler Beatriz Romilly Milo Cawthorne


Wolf Man (2025)

by Luke Bonanno

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.”

Christopher Abbott wields a flashlight like he's going to turn into a wolf, man.

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.

An unlikely workaholic journalist (Julia Garner) shields her daughter's ears and eyes from the horror that is "Wolf Man."

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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