Movie Review – Wolfman (2025)
Principal Cast : Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Benedict Hardie, Zac Chandler, Ben Prendergast.
Synopsis: 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.
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In the fifteen years since 2010’s Benicio del Toro-led The Wolfman, the gradual soft reboot of Universal’s Monster Cinematic Universe ekes out box-office success with The Invisible Man director Leigh Whannell’s next horror flick, Wolfman, a remake of the 1941 classic starring Lon Chaney Jr and Claude Rains, here boasting the very best effects modern studio filmmaking can buy. Sadly, Whannell’s dour, suffocated affair is a turgid misfire, a cloying mess of atmospheric setting, unlikeable characters and a ponderous, stuttering pace that is more annoying than it is effective. It’s one of those films where the very good elements summoned by Whannell, from the cast to the setting to the production design, by rights ought to produce the sinister magic for which the filmmaker is renowned – he is, after all, one half of the writing team behind the original Saw, while also giving us the terrific sci-fi horror indie flick Upgrade – but we’re really only left with an obnoxiously uneven and devastatingly passionless product, resulting in a thoroughly disappointing viewing experience.
Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) lives with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) in San Francisco, far removed from his childhood home of Oregon, where Blake lived with his controlling and militaristic father. Upon learning that his father has been declared deceased by the state after going missing some thirty years prior, Blake takes his family back to Oregon to wrap up his late father’s personal affairs, including the family home on a farm out in the woods. Upon arriving they meet Derek (Benedict Hardie), who offers to guide them to the Lovell farmhouse, only to be attacked by a mysterious creature lurking in the forest, terrifying the trio of newcomers and forcing them inside for the night. Cut off from the world thanks to their isolation, things take a grim turn when Blake, who was scratched by the creature, starts to manifest strange and mysterious after-effects from his encounter, with Charlotte and Ginger suddenly being forced to confront the danger both inside and out.
I guess every director has to have a mulligan from time to time. I’m hoping Wolfman is an aberration; I actively despised this film, despite being able to see exactly what Leigh Whannell was trying to achieve here. There’s elements to the film that are absolutely cool as hell – the film’s ability to show us how Blake’s rapidly evolving senses and gradual transformation into the monstrous creature indicated by the title is indeed superbly rendered by the production, sound design and cinematography, is a particular highlight – and the film subjects the viewer to a litany of horror movie tropes, some even more head-scratching than the last. It’s the coagulation of these disparate elements that fails to ignite the imagination here, held at arm’s length by a weirdly unlikeable family trio and a perplexingly sombre tone that pervades every moment without respite, and this film sorely needed some kind of lighter touch to break the tension. That’s not to say Wolfman should have been a comedy, but the downbeat nature of Blake, his wife Charlotte and – frankly – annoying daughter Ginger (the vaguely grating woodenness of young Matilda Firth) and the oppressively depressing aesthetic Whannell employs to set the mood are unrelenting, to the point it feels like the screen is simply incapable of giving us any light at all.
To call the small ensemble “unlikeable” isn’t to suggest that the actors in the film are in any way bad at their jobs. They’re doing exactly what they’re paid to do, to deliver on the director’s vision and the screenplay’s apparent aggravating inability to make any of them feel like character you want to see succeed. Chris Abbott’s poor Blake Lovell is basically a schmuck, a man with few prospects who’s only dimensionality is that he’s very protective of his daughter, and has lost the spark of passion between he and his wife – a woefully miscast Julia Garner who feels like she belongs in a totally different movie. Garner’s character of Charlotte was the film’s bizarre switch-up, having little emotional connection to either Blake or Ginger from the outset but who serves as the audience’s proxy because getting poor Matilda Firth to shoulder the full weight of seeing her father transform into a hideous beast was probably a stretch too far for the young actress; it’s a really strange way to set the mood of the film, having nobody on the screen that the audience can connect with in an empathetic way, so much so that by the half-way point I kinda wanted them all to be eaten if only to bring the torture of this mess to a close. None of the main three characters have a personality I liked, or could enjoy vicariously as they suffered through this dank horror-fest that, to be honest, had quite minimal gore and spent a lot of time quietly trying to build a sense of menace. The brief inclusion of Upgrade bad-guy Benedict Hardie as the Lovell’s gun-toting neighbour was a creepy surprise, but his turn wasn’t nearly long enough to hoodwink me into thinking the film might start to get Deliverance-level sinister.
So, without a main character to care about, the film simply has to rise on the back of solid horror scares, right? Well, again you’d be wrong. Aside from a terrifically tense opening sequence involving a young Blake (a young Zac Chandler, who is really very good) and his father, played by Sam Jaeger, the film’s dingy cinematography and implacably dense use of shadow and darkness make for confusing, if not annoying viewing. Whannell smothers his film with darkness, punctuated occasionally by elements of the “safety” of regular light, but otherwise Wolfman becomes quite the challenging watch to work out what the hell is going on half the time. The monster effects are well realised but often shot and edited with “frenzy” as the order of the day, and because the film didn’t connect with me emotionally or empathetically from the start, it had nowhere to go but down; a couple of jump scares and some well constructed setpieces go a long way to giving the audience the flesh-tearing expectation of high gore or delirious carnage, but there’s a vacuum sitting right where my care factor ought to have been. It feels so completely manufactured, so uninspired by the classic Wolf Man’s storied big-screen legacy, it could have been any run-of-the-mill horror flick. That it was titled Wolfman gave me some thought it might have been more… I don’t know, exciting? Scary?
About the best part of the film from a purely below-the-line technical aspect was the sound design and editing, which is nearly – nearly, mind you – worth the price of admission alone. A full surround audio mix allowed Whannell to expand the film’s sonic palette to such a degree it made me tingle. Every creak, groan, growl, roar, scream and thud of the various creatures, elements and atmospheric work accorded this sound mix was superbly thunderous as needed, and breathtakingly precise as one might expect from modern Atmos-level filmmaking. Very much Zemeckis-esque, almost Gary Rydstrom-like in its precision and effectiveness. The sonic landscape given to the film is far better than the story or characters might elicit, but props for the sound team here for knocking their job out of the damn park.
I really didn’t like Wolfman. I found the characters unbearable, and the oppressive, humourless tone too much for my enjoyment. It’s a film with no release of tension, a film lacking the humanity to turn its characters into actual people by giving us a reason to care about them, and that’s the most egregious sin, in my opinion. Films can have unlikeable characters as their centrepiece but the trick is to make us invest in their plight or emotional journey, and Wolfman didn’t achieve this for me. Instead, a painfully strident, stumblingly-paced horror entry misfires its focus on style over substance, lamentable writing and underdeveloped characters in a race to “set the mood as hard and often as possible” and falters almost right out of the gate. For the sake of completism at what we lost with Universal’s aborted Dark Universe, this ferociously contentious take by a director I usually admire isn’t one I’ll bother revisiting.
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