Wolf Man (2025)
Directed by Leigh Whannell
With his marriage fraying, Blake persuades his wife Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit his remote childhood home in rural Oregon. As they arrive at the farmhouse in the dead of night, they're attacked by an unseen animal and barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. But as the night stretches on, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable.
5 connections found
View:
5 films that influenced Wolf Man
What critics say influenced Wolf Man
Although the prosthetics here are technically impressive, the overall wolf design is so torn between paying homage to Lon Chaney Jr’s original and avoiding any similarity to the pinnacle of the genre, An American Werewolf in London (1981), that the result looks oddly like one of those deep-sea blobfish.
Anyone who goes back long enough to remember the eye-opening thrills at the time of the visceral transformations in Joe Dante's The Howling or John Landis' An American Werewolf in London — Rob Bottin and Rick Baker really were groundbreaking effects wizards back in 1981 — might judge the latest iteration to be low on fresh juice.
Aside from An American Werewolf in London (1981), there really is no classic werewolf film.
But the werewolf is arguably one of the least popular of the silver screen monsters of late, at least since the entertaining An American Werewolf in London (1981). And with Wolf Man, Blumhouse tries to give this classic monster an emotional makeover.
Unlike the 1941 original, it lacks a truly haunting, tragic vibe (as well as coherent if outlandish expository accoutrements to the macabre occurrences), and unlike Whannell's clever 2020 reimagining of “The Invisible Man,” it fails to infuse the formula with issues conveying a particularly contemporary bite.
Leigh Whannell used The Invisible Man to tell a story of domestic abuse, here he explores themes of childhood trauma and menacing parents.
There’s nothing to match the nerve-rattling foundation of domestic abuse that made The Invisible Man remake so chilling.
The picture, slated to star Ryan Gosling, is being put on the production fast track by Universal Pictures following the worldwide success and acclaim of The Invisible Man, which Whannell wrote and directed.
The film is the latest Whannell has made with the Blumhouse production team, and because this pairing has resulted in works like Upgrade and The Invisible Man, I consider them worthy collaborators.
What if a man… were also a wolf? It’s a question that’s compelled filmmakers for more than 100 years, inspiring a monster movie classic (George Waggner’s “The Wolf Man”), a handful of enduring cult hits (“An American Werewolf in London,” “Ginger Snaps,” etc.), and an endless series of howlingly bad Hollywood misfires from otherwise reliable directors.
If you found Joe Johnston's failed 2010 vehicle for Benicio del Toro, The Wolfman, bogged down by Gothic melodrama, fussy folklore and CGI excess, then the comparatively bare-bones storytelling of Universal's latest return to the monster movie hall of fame, Wolf Man, might be more to your taste.
For being a husband and father, Abbott’s character stands in marked contrast to Chaney’s hangdog loner from 1941’s The Wolf Man. But the attention the film pays to fatherhood—and its setting at the home of Blake’s father—is consistent with earlier takes on the story. The infanticidal aspect of Curt Siodmak’s script for the 1941 film is also present, and brazenly played up, in the 2010 remake, while writer-actor Paul Naschy’s long-running series of werewolf films always emphasized Waldemar Daninsky’s doomed lineage.
Whannell now returns with a follow-up (Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin will soon tackle a Mummy revival), that’s predicated on the same idea: to honour George Waggner’s 1941 classic The Wolf Man, while turning an eye to modern preoccupations.
Advertisement
Fans of Whannell's Upgrade – of which there should be millions because that film is awesome – will be happy to see some of the signature camera movements used in that film adapted here to put the audience in the same unease as Blake while he is transitioning.
Whannell is quite comfortable working with the Blumhouse team, having collaborated with the company on a number of previous projects such as all four entries in the Insidious franchise and his well-received 2018 sci-fi effort Upgrade.
Much like Whannell did with Upgrade, the camera movements perfectly align with what’s happening to him.
The film is the latest Whannell has made with the Blumhouse production team, and because this pairing has resulted in works like Upgrade and The Invisible Man, I consider them worthy collaborators.
Whannell has proven with films like Upgrade and, once more, The Invisible Man that he has it within him to find new and interesting ways to tell stories that might otherwise feel familiar in lesser hands, and to see him settle for an arguably safe approach with Wolf Man is disheartening, to where you almost wonder if this was indeed the film he originally set out to make before other producers and studios got involved.