‘Wolf Man’ Review: Leigh Whannell’s Latest Is A Modern Werewolf Story With A Messy Script

Mary Beth McAndrews   |  

Jan 15, 2025

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Following the success of his 2020 adaptation of The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell is back with another take on the Universal Monsters with Wolf Man. With a script penned by himself and Corbett Tuck (Whannell’s wife), Whannell crafts another poignant meditation on contemporary fear, this time full of Cronenbergian body horror. Unfortunately, an uneven script holds the film back from achieving greatness.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a writer between jobs who lives in the city with his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner). One day, he receives a letter stating that his estranged father is deceased after disappearing in the woods and the family farm in rural Oregon is now Blake’s. In an effort to repair a collapsing marriage, Blake brings Charlotte and Ginger along to pack the cabin, a rare glimpse into his past. Upon their arrival, they’re attacked by something, causing them to crash their moving truck. But the attack doesn’t stop there. The creature chases the family through the woods, who desperately sprint through the trees to find safety. They finally make it to the farm relatively unscathed, except for a scratch on Blake’s arm.

As they fortify the farmhouse against invasion from the strange beast, Blake realizes something’s wrong as his hearing gets sharper, his teeth fall out, and his skin starts to seemingly bubble. Wolf Man becomes a werewolf home invasion film that burns slowly at first but erupts into pulse-pounding scenes reminiscent of some of the best home invasion narratives in the genre.

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But more than just a movie about horrific setpieces, Wolf Man is also a meditation on intergenerational trauma as Blake wants to avoid being anything like his strict father (Sam Jaeger), whose ways are revealed in the film’s cold open. So often modern horror is focused on women’s relationships with their parents (with an emphasis on mommy issues). But Whannell tries to get vulnerable here by offering a look into what it means for an adult man to struggle with daddy issues. Women aren’t the only ones who struggle with their fathers and Wolf Man puts that front and center.

Unfortunately, those emotional beats are rather inconsistent, which stifles the full impact of Wolf Man as a meditation on fatherhood. Whannell and Tuck’s script is so focused on Blake’s story and his relationship with both his father and his daughter, that it almost completely forgets Charlotte, relegating the talented Julia Garner to a disappointingly stunted role that paints her as nothing more than an overworked woman who doesn’t know how to balance career and family. It’s shocking because Whannell wrote Cecilia’s character so beautifully in The Invisible Man. This script feels like a step backward in his progress as a screenwriter, as if he was too distracted by his male characters to see the full picture at hand.

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But the parts of the script focused on Blake and his transformation are perfectly devastating, especially with Abbott’s performance conveying the desperation of a traumatized person trying so desperately to fight against what he’s always known. He is the quintessential Good Dad and to see him quite literally fall apart in front of the only person he truly cares about is heart-breaking. Watching a good parent go through hell in horror is always nauseating and Whannell plays that up to great effect here, especially through some clever cinematography and editing to show us differing perspectives.

Whannell works again with cinematographer Stefan Duscio, who also lensed The Invisible Man. Their partnership again utilizes techniques often seen in found footage (i.e. static shots of empty spaces and slow panning camera to an empty frame) to play with the unseen versus the seen, amping up the tension through seemingly simple camera techniques that have you doubting your very eyes. The panning camera, paired with editing from Andy Canny (another previous Whannell collaborator who previously edited The Invisible Man and Upgrade), is also used to move from how humans see the world to how the transforming Blake now sees the world, a strange place bathed in bright blues where human speech is gibberish and he can no longer form sentences. 

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But perhaps most controversial about Wolf Man is Whannell’s vision for the titular monster. This is not the Wolf Man of yore, covered in thick hair and sporting an elongated snout. Instead, Whannell opts for a werewolf by way of contagion, an affliction transmitted like a disease that leads to the total collapse of the physical form. This is Universal Monsters by way of David Cronenberg, body horror that’s just as much about tugging at your heartstrings as it is about creating a spectacle.

With The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell proved his ability to modernize the Universal Monsters into a terrifying contemporary context. With Wolf Man, despite a disappointing script, Whannell continues that trend by illustrating an understanding of what scares us in the 2020s. Abbott’s performance plus strategically timed moments of visceral gore and set pieces make Wolf Man a thrilling experience that’ll keep you on the edge of your seat.