Wolf Man (2025) Review: Leigh Whannell’s Take on the Classic Lycanthrope Story is a Visceral Single-Night Survival Horror
In Leigh Whannell I trust, especially after his ingenious take on The Invisible Man told from a fresh angle and now, he’s back with the long-awaited follow-up in Wolf Man. The last time Universal Pictures attempted to resurrect The Wolf Man was the flimsy result of an otherwise star-studded, big-budget remake of the 1941 werewolf horror of the same name. That movie cost a whopping US$150 million gamble but the patchy direction, coupled with the erratic pacing and inconsistent CGI turned Joe Johnston’s horror into a cinematic roadkill.
Thankfully, Whannell manages to course-correct The Wolf Man story by approaching his movie in a more primal and straightforward manner. The movie gets off to a dread-inducing start that takes place in a central Oregon forest with a prologue detailing young Blake (Zac Chandler) and his strict father (Sam Jaeger), who live in a secluded farmhouse for a morning deer hunt. What follows next is an encounter with an unseen creature terrorising the forest and apparently, Blake’s father knows about its existence but chooses not to tell him for the sake of his safety.
Fast forward to thirty years later, Blake (Christopher Abbott) is now an adult married to his journalist wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner) and they have a young daughter named Ginger (Matilda Firth). He made his living as a writer but he is seen spending more time with his daughter while his wife is constantly busy with work. His relationship with Charlotte seems to be cold and distant but one day after he receives a letter about his father’s death and leaves him the farmhouse. They decide to take a trip down to central Oregon, hoping for the three of them together to reconnect as a family spending quality time.
En route to the farmhouse, it was already at night and that’s when Blake stumbles upon a creature standing in the middle of the road, causing him to swerve the rented moving truck and careen down the cliff. From here, Whannell turns Wolf Man into a single-night survival horror but he doesn’t rush to get to the point with his deliberate pacing in exploring Blake’s gradual transformation after one of his arms is badly injured. He starts to feel sick after he and his family retreat to the farmhouse.
Whannell, who also co-wrote the screenplay with actress-turned-writer Corbett Tuck, approaches the familiar subject matter as a form of contagious disease minus the werewolf lore associated with the likes of full moon and silver bullet. Whannell clearly isn’t interested in diving deep into the details of how the werewolf exists in the first place. Instead, he prefers the economical narrative of how Blake, who is slowly turning into a werewolf himself and his family, Charlotte and Ginger try to stay alive throughout the night with no outside help whatsoever. Even as Blake becomes physically altered due to the infection that eventually spreads throughout his body, he still shows a sympathetic side — a result that Abbott carries his subtle performance admirably.
It’s worth noting that Wolf Man isn’t about the classic good vs evil storytelling as Blake’s eventual werewolf transformation is depicted more of a tragic figure than an outright monster. The transformation itself is reportedly done more practically through the impressive combination of elaborate makeup effects with sparing use of CGI. Interestingly, Whannell manages to find a novel way of depicting Blake’s transformation from his perspective and Charlotte and Ginger’s point of view through a rotating camera angle. Each time his wife tries to speak with him, Blake can’t comprehend what she says as her voice becomes muffled and indecipherable from his animalistic viewpoint.
As Charlotte, Julia Garner’s equally well-acted character isn’t a damsel in distress and as soon as her husband can’t protect the family anymore, it’s up to her to improvise the dire situation. At one point, she notices a pick-up truck and intends for a getaway, leading to the movie’s most thrilling moment — which is already prominently shown in the trailer — of them subsequently being attacked by a werewolf. The action is visceral and suspenseful with Benjamin Wallfisch’s pulse-pounding score elevating the moment each time the stakes kick in.
And while I appreciate the movie’s lean running time at just 103 minutes, Whannell’s direction tends to deflate what could have been a sustained tension with his strangely stop-start momentum. The movie doesn’t rely heavily on obligatory jump scares, even though I wish Whannell could have pushed more on the frighteningly tense and gory moments. Overall, Wolf Man may not reach the creative and thematic heights of his superior Invisible Man but his still-exceptional second Universe Monsters movie proves the franchise remains in good hands.
