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Image via Universal
While Universal has had no shortage of box office hits and Oscar winners, most recently with the colossal success of Oppenheimer, when it comes to building their own cinematic universe, they continue to lag behind. In the 2010s, as the MCU started taking over the box office, Universal promised a new Dark Universe that would bring back Universal’s classic monsters, which include Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula, and the Wolf Man. The dire performance of the Tom Cruise-led Mummy reboot in 2017 led the studio to put their franchise efforts on the back burner. Their more recent attempts have seen far more success, with Renfield and Abigail both being fun yet somewhat forgettable vampire updates. They were entertaining horror comedies, but they didn’t exactly make audiences desperate for more lore.
However, 2020’s The Invisible Man, one of the last major releases before the pandemic, was a surprising refresh of their classic catalog, turning the 1933 creature into an allegory for domestic abuse and the culture of not believing female victims. The success was less credited to Universal and more to writer-director Leigh Whannell, best known for penning collaborations with director James Wan, with modern horror classics such as Saw and Insidious. Thus, even though the Dark Universe got off to a rocky start, expectations were permitted to be high for Whannell’s second Universal Monsters reboot, Wolf Man. But, alas, the finished product doesn’t feel like a Whannell film or a Universal Monsters one. It’s tainted by the bland, repetitive brand of Blumhouse, the production house by Jason Blum that has churned out some of the worse horror releases in recent years for Universal, namely Five Nights at Freddy’s, Night Swim, and Exorcist: Believer.
Leigh Whannell’s 'Wolf Man' Is a Modern Reboot of 1941’s 'The Wolf Man'
A reboot of the 1941 movie starring Lon Cheney (an actor with such monstrous versatility, that he earned the nickname “The Man of a Thousand Faces”), 2025’s Wolf Man follows a somewhat similar premise of a family man who gets bitten by a werewolf, instigating an excruciating transformation. But where the original focused on the curse’s impact on a small English countryside town, Whannell’s reboot zeroes in on one family. Blake (Christopher Abbott), a 30-something unemployed writer living in New York, takes his unhappy and distant wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), to his father’s farm in Oregon, where he had an unusual childhood. As we see in the first 20 minutes, his ex-military paranoid father would take a young Blake hunting, despite the rumors of a missing hiker now stalking the grounds as a werewolf.
In the current day, Blake’s father is finally declared deceased years after his disappearance, and so the family travels to the farm to clear out the house. It’s an opportunity for them to reconnect with each other, especially Charlotte and Blake, but it’s also a chance for Blake to discover what really happened to his father. Once there, they crash their van and are stalked by an unseen bipedal creature, and Blake gets bitten. They take shelter in Blake’s childhood home, and from there, it’s a battle between the clan and the monstrous force trying to make its way in… until the real danger starts coming from inside the house.
'Wolf Man's Characters Are Bland
Image via Universal
What makes the majority of Wolf Man such a disappointment is the first 20 minutes. The opening act promises a far more interesting tale than the one we eventually get. The insight into Blake’s childhood is a Leave No Trace-type story, blending horror mythology with tense human drama. But just when the film starts garnering steam, it skips 30 years, and the whole story falls into the same, repetitive trappings of the latest Blumhouse fare. A family of half-written characters who, in an attempt to come closer together, find themselves in the crosshairs of a waking nightmare. Blumhouse yet again promises a horror experience like no other only to serve up a boring, contrived family drama that lacks scares and hammers home the importance of the all-American family unit.
The saccharine moments between Blake and his daughter, and the overkill hammering of the audience to remind us that Blake is a family man through and through, supersede any sense of atmosphere or dread. The original Wolf Man had the scope of an entire town, and focused on an outsider crying out to be believed and helped. As they move to Oregon, the only characters are Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger (and one other who becomes a casualty before you can say “snoozefest”), and none of them are fleshed-out enough to root for. It’s a surprising let-down from Whannell, whose decades-long writing career has produced so many compelling characters. From Elisabeth Moss’ taunted protagonist in The Invisible Man to Insidious’ Lambert Family, Whannell knows how to write both lone wolves (pun intended) and a genuine, everyday family. But here, Blake and Charlotte are bland stand-ins, with their conflict and character depth defined by plot devices we’ve seen a million times before.
Wolf Man is a story of man, animal, and nature coming to a head, so turning the reboot into an essential home invasion story is an immensely ill-suited choice. The second act of the movie is Charlotte and Blake trying to stop the outside werewolf from coming inside. The forest and vast landscape of the Oregon countryside are wasted, and Wolf Man starts to resemble just about every other Blumhouse movie. To its credit, there are some decent gore scenes, and the practical makeup is done well, but not enough to distract from some pretty laughable special effects. Compared to the original and even the 2010 version that won the Oscar for Best Makeup, Whannell’s version isn’t breaking any new ground.
Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner Give Flat Performances in 'Wolf Man'
Image via Universal
The performances, unfortunately, aren’t any better, as Christopher Abbott feels out of depth here. Known predominantly for character-focused dramas such as shows like Girls and movies like Sanctuary and Poor Things, leading a studio horror movie in a role that demands a feral, tragic performance may not have been the right project for the skittish, introspective style of Abbott’s acting. His talents are much better suited to atmospheric, slow-burn horror fare like A24’s It Comes at Night. His Blake is defined by trauma and guilt, and Abbott does bring an interiority to his character in these smaller moments. But when the hairy gloves come on and the performance demands primal conflict and animalistic rage, Abbott doesn’t feel up to the task.
Alas, Abbott isn’t nearly the worst part of the film, as Julia Garner’s Charlotte is one of the driest characters in recent horror. It’s certainly both stemming from Garner’s stiff, unemotive performance, but also from superficial characterization and an unignorable lack of chemistry with Abbott. Moments where Blake asks Charlotte a perfectly normal question see Garner stare blankly at her co-star, her face a stone wall inhibiting any emotion from being read. With Abbott just off his supporting role in Kraven the Hunter and Garner set to play the Silver Surfer in the MCU’s Fantastic Four movie, it’s sad to see the two actors’ talents wasted in material that isn’t suited to them. Both have seen tremendous success in prestige TV and smaller indie dramas, and Wolf Man suggests that that’s where they should stay.
Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a masterclass in balancing homage and update and set the standard for the Universal-Blumhouse horror reboots. Wolf Man doesn’t reach the heights of Whannell’s feature debut. It dissolves into the sea of similar hollow, glossy big-budget horrors that have become more and more frequent (and almost always come from Blumhouse). And with 2024 being a colossal year for the genre, from stand-alone indies like Longlegs, surprisingly excellent big-budget sequels such as Smile 2, and one of the greatest remakes of all time in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Wolf Man just can’t compare to the bite-size of its much superior contemporaries.
Wolf Man comes to theaters on January 17.
Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man reboot is a bland family drama with superficial characters and barely any scares.
Pros
- The gore and practical effects are a highlight.
Cons
- Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner feel out of place and can't breathe life into their flat characters.
- The basic premise of the family unit being targeted feels repetitive and derivative of other Blumhouse movies.
- Leigh Whannell's usual sharp writing isn't present in a script with no thematic subtext.
Release Date January 15, 2025
Director Leigh Whannell
Runtime 103 minutes
Writers Leigh Whannell , Rebecca Angelo
English (US) ·