Universal Monsters, once a pantheon of hauntingly human fears and grotesque grandeur, have suffered a strange fate in the hands of contemporary filmmakers. From the ambitious flop of The Mummy (2017) to the success of The Invisible Man (2020), the legacy of these creatures has been reinvented, re-imagined, and often, tragically, undercut. The latest in this lineage, Wolf Man (2025), directed by Leigh Whannell, should have been a triumphant return to the dark, eerie legacy of lycanthropy. Instead, it feels like a muddled, half-hearted stumble, a creature feature without the creature.
For all of its marketing promises, Wolf Man is anything but monstrous. The film begins with an enticing premise: Blake (Christopher Abbott), a man desperate to repair his fractured life and marriage, relocates his family to a remote Oregon farmhouse; a place of his own troubled childhood. Yet, instead of a campfire legend or a terrible curse, we are given a virus. Yes, a virus. As if the underwhelming specter of a werewolf’s fate were no longer suitable for a full moon, Whannell and screenwriter Corbett Tuck have turned lycanthropy into a vague, feeble contagion that behaves like a bad flu with a few deformities and superhuman abilities. Gone are the dark hallucinatory transformations, the terror of the full moon rising in a sky that is never quite as empty as we’d like. In its place, Blake’s gradual descent into his lupine form resembles not an ancient curse but a bloated metaphor for middle-aged health decline, with the occasional oddity; heightened senses, a spasm of violence, a biting-off-your-own-arm moment, sliced in for flavor.
One might argue that reinvention is essential, but Whannell’s take is no reinvention. It is a hollow shell of a werewolf movie. The classic tale of a man cursed by the moonlight is stripped of its mysticism and terror, reduced to a clinical unraveling that could easily be about any number of psychological breakdowns, only with more fur and a few awkwardly placed wolfish traits. Instead of the familiar anguish of transformation; the grotesque twisting of flesh, the gut-wrenching howl; the film offers only underwhelming moments of semi-deformation. Blake’s evolution is not one of pain or torment, but of slightly sharper teeth, some thicker hair on his chest, and a few unfortunate fingernail replacements. These barely register as monstrous. The transformation scenes, which have historically been among the most visceral and iconic in the horror genre, are nothing but a missed opportunity, leaving us with little more than a cosmetic afterthought of a werewolf.
The narrative, such as it is, hinges on Blake’s increasingly unstable behavior, his deteriorating relationship with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Abbott, usually a compelling actor, seems stranded here, unable to summon any of the emotional turmoil that could elevate his character from everyman to tragic figure. The family’s reaction to his creeping transformation is equally limp; there’s no palpable fear, no overwhelming sense of dread as the man they love starts to devour himself from the inside out. For a film about a man losing control, the stakes remain stubbornly low. The “climax,” a final showdown between two werewolves, is laughable in its lack of intensity as if a high school drama club had choreographed the fight.
At the core of the problem is a lack of urgency. Where The Invisible Man managed to build tension and suspense through a careful study of isolation and creeping paranoia, Wolf Man seems content to plod along without generating any real scares or thrills. Instead, we are treated to long stretches of boredom, punctuated by nonsensical flashes of color and sound that aim to signify Blake’s heightened senses but instead feel like the fevered visions of a filmmaker who has lost track of what made these stories frightening in the first place. The film seems unaware of its own tonal identity, stumbling between a family drama, a weak thriller, and a low-budget body horror movie, without ever committing fully to any of them. In one particularly absurd moment, Blake’s heightened sense of hearing is symbolized by the loud screeching of a spider crawling across the floor, an audacious decision that undermines any sense of dread. It’s as if the film is mocking the very notion of horror, refusing to even try to evoke the kind of visceral fear that made Wolf Man (1941) a genre-defining classic.
Ultimately, Wolf Man fails to fulfill any of the promises inherent in its premise. It’s neither an engaging character study nor a chilling horror film. Rather, it’s a missed opportunity, a creature stranded between genres and ideas, lurching toward something unidentifiable and unscary. When the credits roll, all that lingers is a faint disappointment, a howl that fades into the distance, far from the monstrous legacy it should have upheld. Wolf Man might not be worth your time, unless you’re in the mood to watch a film that’s lost its bite; stuck in a state of permanent, unremarkable transformation. Shoot it with a silver bullet and put it out of its misery. Skip it.