Blake’s childhood in rural Oregon wasn’t a happy one, but when his father was declared dead, he found himself in a van with his wife and their daughter headed to his childhood home.
Before they make it to the house, though, the car goes careening off the road and Blake (Christopher Abbott) is scratched by a creature in the woods. While still under threat from the werewolf, with a barricaded door between them, Blakes transformation begins.
That’s the premise of “Wolf Man,” which is a reboot of a Universal classic monster. Since I’m admittedly unfamiliar with the monster outside of this movie, I’ll focus on the 2025 film version on its own.
Although the film is meant to be straight horror, some parts were just a little bit hard to take seriously. I think this might just be a conceptual problem — it’s hard to make a man growing a snout more scary than funny. The choice to change up the wolf-man appearance (he still looks quite human and actually loses some of the hair from his head as opposed to being covered in fur) does help.
However, the horror of Blake’s transformation was genuinely scary. The way it was shot was disorienting and isolating. The film eerily amplifies sounds, distorts speech, and warps colors to make the transformation all the more disorienting, flipping between his sensory world and that of his family. However, the bright colors and glowing eyes of his family bordered on silly at times.
The body horror was the most impressive aspect of the film: even before he becomes fully “wolf-like,” Blake’s face is disturbing; the way he carries himself is disconcerting from the start. The movie has body horror that is far more shocking than the chase scenes or the jump scares.
The film isn’t horrifying enough to excuse its plot, which rang as uninspired. The writing was cliche and relied on some tired plot devices: an identity reveal preempted by a shot unsubtly lingering on a tattoo, a slightly kooky local who scares the big-city girl, a workaholic parent who’s struggling to connect with her precocious kid.
I spent a lot of the film frustrated by the characters’ survival instincts; it’s hard to resist the urge to yell at the screen. While peeving, that’s probably a testament to the anxiety the film builds.
It’s not bad, but it’s not riveting. You never get to know the characters. There’s potential for commentary on parenting and the lasting impact of anger on a child, but it’s handled pretty clumsily. While Blake’s transformation looks and sounds scary, the emotional impact is lost.
In the first scene of the film, we see Blake as a child being scolded by his angry father. Then, Blake appears on screen as a parent himself, holding a pink teddy bear and willing to apologize to his daughter. It’s clear that Blake’s afraid of adopting his father’s rage. The differences in their parenting styles are already stark, but the movie still spoon-feeds the audience by having Blake explain his parenting anxieties with an artificial precision to his daughter…It seemed out-of-place in a film that isn’t dialogue-heavy, and I think it would’ve been more effective if it’d been left for the viewer to recognize on their own.
Atmospherically though, the film is good enough. It’s gloomy and dark and honestly scary. Sometimes the darkness is appreciated; nighttime is relevant to the story. Often the color saturation is turned all the way down and, while it’s a fun thematic contrast with Blake’s transformation, it’s also sort of dull
I don’t imagine Wolf Man will ever be a classic creature film, but it’s a far cry from truly bad. It’s a fun movie to watch in theaters or gently poke fun at, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to see it.
