Wolf Man
Director: Leigh Whannell
Writer: Leigh Whannell, Corbett Tuck
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Ben Prendergast
Seen on: 7.2.2025

Plot:
Blake’s (Christopher Abbott) father Grady (Sam Jaeger) went missing many years ago. Now he has officially been declared dead and Blake has received the keys of his childhood home. He decides to take his family, wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) there for a holiday. But there is a monster stalking the woods around that house and the family soon finds themselves fighting for their lives.

After the brilliant Invisible Man, I was very excited for this continuation of reboots of the horror classics. Also, I really like werewolves. Unfortunately, though, Wolf Man was a disappointment.

Wolf Man has several issues, the foremost being that it just couldn’t keep up the tension necessary for the story to work. It starts of creepily enough, but then it quickly loses steam as it treads too many too well-known story beats and fails to wrangle somthing fresh from them. Admittedly, it was the third movie I saw that day, but I actually dozed off a little in the last third.

The second big problem is that I dozed off a little, and yet had no problem following the plot that is pretty straightforward. One doesn’t always have to have complicated plots, but when you can miss good chunks of a film but still feel like you haven’t actually missed anything, it’s an issue.

And the final bit that doesn’t work is the more symbolic layer of the story. There is usually something symbolic, especially with the classics. Werewolves are mostly a comment on the animal nature in humans, especially in men, so there is this whole traditional layer of masculinity as discussed through werewolves (there are exceptions, of course). Given that Invisible Man already focused on gender(ed violence), I was reasonably certain that Wolf Man would analyse masculinity in some form. But it did not, or if it did, it was a muddled and bleak perspective that I don’t want to consider any further.

Of course, the film is under no obligation to provide this analysis, but it does feel like a missed opportunity that it didn’t, just as it feels like it squandered its cast. I just expected more from all of it.

Summarizing: disappointing.