Wolf Man (2025)
January 27, 2025 4:10 AM - Subscribe
A family at a remote farmhouse is attacked by an unseen animal, but as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.
RogerEbert.com review:
Leigh Whannell connected with critics and audiences with 2020’s excellent “The Invisible Man,” an effective reimagining of the classic Universal Monsters character. He returns five years later with a similar stab at an oft-told tale in “Wolf Man,” an attempt to drag this classic movie monster to its primal roots. Sadly, Whannell and his team never figured out how to break this story, delivering a film that’s half-hearted when it shows any pulse at all, a movie that’s almost obsessively underdone on every level from its low lighting to its subdued emotions to its lack of character depth. “Wolf Man” is one of those movies that exists in the space between bad and good, never offensively awful enough to qualify as a complete waste of time but falling short in so many individual elements that it dissipates from memory almost while you’re watching it.
Chicago Sun-Times review:
If you loved David Cronenberg’s brilliant and twisted and memorably disgusting body-horror re-imagining of “The Fly,” you’ll probably dig what director and co-writer Leigh Whannell does with “Wolf Man.” Just as Whannell breathed new life into the story of “The Invisible Man” in 2020, he offers a fresh and grotesquely chilling take on the well-trodden storyline of the man who becomes ... something else.
AP review:
Slack when it should be terrifying, “Wolf Man” suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.
RogerEbert.com review:
Leigh Whannell connected with critics and audiences with 2020’s excellent “The Invisible Man,” an effective reimagining of the classic Universal Monsters character. He returns five years later with a similar stab at an oft-told tale in “Wolf Man,” an attempt to drag this classic movie monster to its primal roots. Sadly, Whannell and his team never figured out how to break this story, delivering a film that’s half-hearted when it shows any pulse at all, a movie that’s almost obsessively underdone on every level from its low lighting to its subdued emotions to its lack of character depth. “Wolf Man” is one of those movies that exists in the space between bad and good, never offensively awful enough to qualify as a complete waste of time but falling short in so many individual elements that it dissipates from memory almost while you’re watching it.
Chicago Sun-Times review:
If you loved David Cronenberg’s brilliant and twisted and memorably disgusting body-horror re-imagining of “The Fly,” you’ll probably dig what director and co-writer Leigh Whannell does with “Wolf Man.” Just as Whannell breathed new life into the story of “The Invisible Man” in 2020, he offers a fresh and grotesquely chilling take on the well-trodden storyline of the man who becomes ... something else.
AP review:
Slack when it should be terrifying, “Wolf Man” suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.
I'm surprised at the reviews on this. I watched it last night and it kicked my ass up and down. I watch a ton of horror and rarely catch feelings -- this one had me on the edge of my seat at times and blinking away tears at times. Maybe I was feeling especially emotionally vulnerable, but it hit me hard.
Having the scenes from the wolf's perspective made such a difference -- it made our wolf man a bigger part of the movie, not just the monster.
posted by skullhead at 5:28 PM on January 27 [3 favorites]
Having the scenes from the wolf's perspective made such a difference -- it made our wolf man a bigger part of the movie, not just the monster.
posted by skullhead at 5:28 PM on January 27 [3 favorites]
Like skullhead, I liked this a lot more than the reviews/buzz led me to believe I would. I'm always a fan of a tight 90 in horror movies, and while I think it sagged a bit in the setup at the beginning, and there was probably a trimmable 15 minutes or so in the middle, that'd bring it down to about 60 minutes, so... ehhhh.
On the whole, I thought it was well assembled and smart. Some of it was pretty telegraphed (dad's missing and declared dead, etc.), but no more than most horror.
The biggest plot hole, I think, was that Gun Dad didn't... have any guns? I was thinking (with Kitteh) that maybe people swung by the house and took shit while he was missing (there were also book shelves with no books on them), but also a lot of decent stuff in the house too, like a perfectly functional CB radio, three, uh, hamhocks curing in the basement. Granted, them finding Gun Dad's gun cache might have made the movie a whole lot shorter too, but whatcha gonna do.
The traditional werewolf problem of "if a scratch turns somebody into a werewolf, you'd think there'd be a heck of a lot more werewolves," but that's kind of a permanent problem with these things.
posted by Shepherd at 5:12 PM on February 7
On the whole, I thought it was well assembled and smart. Some of it was pretty telegraphed (dad's missing and declared dead, etc.), but no more than most horror.
The biggest plot hole, I think, was that Gun Dad didn't... have any guns? I was thinking (with Kitteh) that maybe people swung by the house and took shit while he was missing (there were also book shelves with no books on them), but also a lot of decent stuff in the house too, like a perfectly functional CB radio, three, uh, hamhocks curing in the basement. Granted, them finding Gun Dad's gun cache might have made the movie a whole lot shorter too, but whatcha gonna do.
The traditional werewolf problem of "if a scratch turns somebody into a werewolf, you'd think there'd be a heck of a lot more werewolves," but that's kind of a permanent problem with these things.
posted by Shepherd at 5:12 PM on February 7
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This movie would have done much, much better if it had not been framed as a reboot. There are faint thematic links to 1941's The Wolf Man, as well as 2010's The Wolfman, but only faint. They were smart not to go the more direct route of the 2010 remake, and the pressure-cooker plot naturally amps up the tension.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:18 AM on January 27