‘Wolf Man’ Review – Leigh Whannell Dismantles Werewolf Lore with Ambitious Body Horror

Writer/Director Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, like 2020’s The Invisible Man, bears little resemblance to the Universal Monsters movie upon which it’s loosely based. Though it similarly centers on a man who returns to his ancestral home only to find himself grappling with a bizarre affliction after an equally strange animal attack, an inciting scene set in a rental truck bearing the name of Universal’s legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce and the year 1941, The Wolf Man‘s release year, serves as an early torch-passing signal not to expect a retread here.

Instead, Leigh Whannell reinterprets the horror classic from a modern lens, decimating all of the cinematic werewolf rules in the process. That alone makes Whannell’s interpretation of the Wolf Man mythos an ambitious yet polarizing effort.

The reluctant Wolf Man in this story is Blake (Christopher Abbott, Poor Things), introduced as a doting stay-at-home dad to young Ginger (Matlida Firth) despite a rather traumatic upbringing thanks to a strict, militant father (Sam Jaeger). So much so that Blake became estranged from his dad and had long come to terms with his death when dad suddenly went missing from his isolated Pacific Northwest home. When news arrives that Blake has inherited his father’s assets, it offers the perfect excuse to get out of the city with Ginger and his career-focused wife Charlotte (Julia Garner, Apartment 7A) in the hopes of smoothing out the mounting tension in his marriage.

Instead, the small family unit finds themselves fighting for their lives when a mysterious threat attacks.

There’s a clean, straightforward symmetry to Wolf Man‘s narrative structure. The stunning but inhospitable stretch of rural Oregon wilderness introduced in the intense opening sequence bookends the story, introducing Blake’s deep-seated father issues and the course correction it prompted in Blake when nurturing his relationship with his own precocious child. Add in Charlotte’s complicated feelings over her struggle to balance her career and parenthood, and it becomes clear this is a family in turmoil before the horror arrives.

Yet, what, exactly, Wolf Man wants to say on generational trauma isn’t quite as clear because the family trio is plunged into an intense survive-the-night siege that leaves very little room for character arcs to breathe or develop. Garner’s Charlotte is given admirable room to prove her mettle as an adaptive survivalist, but less satisfying is her emotional arc as a mom and wife; there’s simply not much time in this sparse story to adequately bridge her early trepidations and jealousy to where the story leaves her.

It’s slightly less clunky when it comes to Abbott’s Blake, who bears more in common with The Fly‘s Seth Brundle than Lawrence Talbot. But whereas Seth found his body undergoing horrifying mutations over a period of time, poor Blake is rapidly changing over the course of one night. That’s the first overt sign that Whannell is scrapping all the lore as we know it; the entire movie is the transformation instead of a single quick sequence. Whannell finds inventive ways to interpret this, immersing viewers in Blake’s plight by letting us see through his changing eyes in some instances. There is also no shortage of grotesque body horror moments as Blake fights to maintain control of his faculties and doesn’t always win.

Christopher Abbott commits to the physical demands of this kind of insanity, including crawling on all fours or gnawing at an injured arm, without ever losing focus on Blake’s core humanity. It helps, even as Blake’s strange affliction and its gruesome nature feel far too perfunctory for a story about a family ultimately trying to cope with an inexplicable, life-altering illness. 

Whannell’s bid to ground Wolf Man thoroughly in realism, right down to a creature design that evokes a diseased cryptid more than, well, a wolf man, creates a conflicting duality. Like Larry Talbot at odds with his encroaching primal beast, both halves seeking dominant control over his body, Whannell’s Wolf Man is a film at odds with itself. The sudden onslaught of a serious illness, one that rapidly ravages and metastasizes Blake’s body, effectively captures how violently time can be ripped away from families. Yet it becomes too rushed in setting this allegory over a single night when the family is also preoccupied by ongoing threats and obstacles. Whannell finds ways to mine suspense from an abandoned rural homestead, though not all of it effectively; a cat-and-mouse sequence in a barn is so underlit it’s tough to make out what’s happening on screen.

It yields a film that’s both thematically dense yet narratively stretched thin, with its sparse storytelling making it easy to dwell on the foreshadowing and predict obvious outcomes. Whannell is a talented filmmaker with bold ideas, but his Wolf Man is stretched far too thin for its many lofty ideas to the point where it lacks a firm identity. The filmmaker dismantles the lore and delivers a bold new take on the werewolf, smartly refusing to explain its rules, but it’s so wrapped up in its underserved characters and subtext that it forgets to be scary. 

Wolf Man releases in theaters on January 17, 2025.