Wolf
Man
2025
Director- Leigh Whannell
Cast-Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott, Matilda
Firth, Sam Jaeger
The movie
begins with an anecdote about a sickness in the Pacific northwest that drives
people mad, a sickness that the local indigenous people call “the face of the
wolf.”
The story
follows the Lovell family, who are having a hard time functioning as a unit. The
husband, Blake, gets news that his estranged father, who has been missing for
years, has finally been declared dead. Blake talks his wife into joining him,
along with their daughter, as he goes to collect his father’s things from his
incredibly remote home.
Things
quicky go South when Blake is attacked by a werewolf and the rest of the movie revolves
around his wife and daughter having to deal with the unravelling and metamorphosis
of their husband/ father over the course of a night.
First off,
the movie probably shouldn’t have been called Wolf Man since it has nothing in
common with its namesake. The 2010 Wolfman was a petty faithful remake of the original
with the same setting and essentially the same plot. Frankly, giving this new movie
that name just hurts it, as it inevitably draws a comparison to films that it
shouldn’t be compared to (maybe they should have just called it Face of the
Wolf).
Being that
it’s a Blumhouse film, there have been some horror “gatekeepers” that have been
scoring it for months. It does suffer from some of the same problems as many
other mainstream horror films, but it does have some things to recommend it.
The Bad- The plot could be summarized as “Generational
family trauma and werewolves that represent the generational family trauma.” I
don’t why so many modern horror films feel compelled to go down this lane.
Maybe it makes Gen Z viewers feel more at home, who knows.
It also
has that terrible new style “realistic” dark lighting where its hard to see
anything. Now it’s, not as bad as Aliens vs Predator Requiem (nothing is that
bad), but if you’re going to stream the movie at home, you better do it at
night with the blinds down.
The Good- A fresh new plot! Most werewolf movies tend to
fall into one of two types. Type 1) where the protagonist is a schmuck that
gets bit by a werewolf and the movie follows their gradual descent into lycanthropy
(The original Wolfman and American Werewolf in London being the best examples).
Type 2) where the werewolf is the antagonist with an unknown identify and the
protagonist spends the movie trying to discover who is the werewolf (The
Howling and Silver Bullet being the best examples).
This movie
is neither. We know who the werewolf is pretty much from the start, but the focus
is more on the family’s reaction to it. The film also gives us some interesting
POV as we see and hear the world changing gradually in the mind of the unfortunate
werewolf-to-be. It also eschews all the tropes of the genre; wolf’s bane and
full moons are nowhere to be found.
It’s a very
small-scale movie; a small cast spending most of the film on one set. It also has a (comparatively) small budget for a main stream film.
Don’t
watch it if you’re expecting a timeless werewolf classic. But if you are a werewolf fan looking for a
new take on the genre, it’s worth your time.