Last Updated on February 18, 2025 by Angel Melanson
The werewolf has proven such a metaphorically malleable monster in recent decades, given new meaning in everything from John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps to Larry Fessenden’s Blackout, that it was a natural for filmmaker Leigh Whannell to follow up The Invisible Man with a new take on another of Universal Pictures’ classic-creature stable.
As it turns out, his Wolf Man is not as vividly allegorical as Invisible Man, which successfully explored very topical and charged themes of domestic abuse through a sci-fi/horror lens. What the new film successfully does is narrow down the focus to a family of three (plus a fourth lingering in the backstory) and how the father tries to keep his promise of protecting his family even as his humanity begins to slip away.
A lengthy prologue set in 1995 introduces as to Blake Lovell as a boy (Zac Chandler), who is raised by his father Grady (Sam Jaeger) with strict military discipline in and around a house in the Oregon woods. Physical survival is the key to his life lessons, which will be reflected when the grown Blake (Christopher Abbott) returns to that remote home 30 years later.
Grady has long been missing and is now presumed dead, and on the trip to pack up Grady’s belongings, Blake brings along his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). The early scenes in Wolf Man, which Whannell scripted with Corbett Tuck, efficiently establish a family that’s loving but troubled, as Blake and Charlotte have doubts about their parental abilities that they do their best to hide from Ginger.
As darkness falls during their drive, a series of well-staged, harrowing events strand the trio at that house, with something growly and fearsome prowling outside. It has injured Blake, and as the night goes on, he begins to undergo changes, initially subtle—there’s a nicely creepy little sequence establishing how sensitive his hearing has become. We know, of course, what kind of movie we’re watching and what’s happening to Blake, but Whannell, Tuck and their cast create a tense and affecting scenario wherein what Blake is becoming is not as important as what he is losing, and how long he’ll be able to hold onto his humanity.
Abbott gives both an emotionally and physically intense performance as Blake, conveying Blake’s plight even as his features are overtaken by Arjen Tuiten’s prosthetics. (Tuiten’s work is not of the Rick Baker/Rob Bottin showy transformative school, but rather attuned to retaining the humanity behind the bestial.)
Garner is her usual terrific self as Charlotte bravely tries to reach her deteriorating husband and then must fight against him, while Firth is the genre’s latest child-actor discovery in a very sympathetic turn. Even though not all the story developments are surprising (no prizes for guessing the nature of the beast threatening the Lovells), the trio of leads get us sufficiently caring about this imperiled family that we’re consistently scared for them when things get hairy.
While Wolf Man, by the nature of its subject, is not as technologically flashy as The Invisible Man was at points, Whannell has overseen another very solidly crafted picture here. Teaming for the third time with cinematographer Stefan Duscio, he creates gorgeously moody images on the New Zealand locations, backed by Benjamin Wallfisch’s occasionally overemphatic but generally shivery score. Special shout-out to P.K. Hooker and Will Files’ sound design, which does a lot to create a sense of unease and, as the film goes on, to draw us into Blake’s altered state of mind.
As opposed to Universal’s past Wolf Man films (including 2010’s more direct remake), Whannell’s movie is more in the tradition of The Fly and similar studies of monstrous transmogrification as a sickness. The filmmaker does throw in a few shoutouts to lycanthropictures past: The name on the Lovells’ moving truck is Pierce (cf. Jack Pierce, the legendary makeup master who transformed Lon Chaney Jr. into the original Wolf Man), while one shot appears to homage a creepy highlight from An American Werewolf in London.
And a situation toward the end, consciously or not, brings Whannell’s whole horror career full circle. Yet even with the echoes, Wolf Man is very much its own movie, and the second confirmation that dropping the Dark Universe program and assigning the Universal fiends to thematically ambitious talents like Whannell was absolutely the right idea. Bring on Lee Cronin’s The Mummy!
