Still // Wolf Man (2025) via IMDb
ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY. Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott and Matilda Firth experience the horrors of family vacation.
By: Magnus Blanchard-Rockhill
Staff-Writer
While the premise of “Wolf Man” (2025) is a fine one, and while writer-director Leigh Whannell and other writer Corbett Tuck clearly had a vision, I just don’t know how well it was executed.
This is not a bad movie by any means, but if you want to adapt a character as iconic as the wolf man for a modern audience, then you need to do something interesting with it. Otherwise, why am I watching?
Often, a thread is hinted at or shown that feels like it could go somewhere fun, and then nothing more is ever done with it. The changes in perspective between Charlotte and Blake when he begins to become the wolf man are fascinating, and I wish more would have been done with it.
This movie’s dialogue is also lacking. Too much exposition is done verbally when it could have been done visually. There are a couple of times that a piece of important information is revealed on screen in a completely unsubtle way, and then this same information is expressed verbally immediately afterwards for no reason.
Ginger, the daughter, is used as a way to justify huge annoying exposition drops constantly. Blake in particular just trauma dumps on her constantly in order to tell the audience things like “I don’t want to be my father” when this information is expressed in better ways throughout the film. It permeates everything about the story, so why are you looking me dead in my eyes and telling me?
The movie looks fine, though it falls victim to the inescapable disease plaguing many modern horror movies: flat, boring uses of light and color. I hope maybe it was just some fault of the theater I was watching this in, but everything looks the same the whole time, and the characters don’t really pop off the screen that much. The camera work is good, and some of the shots do look really cool, but overall it is not interesting.
The story has a lot of potential, but I wish some of the concepts had been explored much further. A story of a father trying desperately to not do to his daughter what his father did to him is so heart-wrenching. Watching Blake enter his childhood home for the first time in years and immediately, despite himself, begin to become exactly what he is afraid of feels so hopeless.
The wolf man here seems to represent tendencies towards paranoid overprotection of the family and well-meaning but overbearing parenting. Fear of the wolf man leads to overprotection, which leads to becoming the wolf man, and then we’re back to fear of the wolf man. This is something I love about this movie, genuinely.
Becoming the wolf man also makes you incapable of effective communication with your family. It makes you stop seeing your loved ones as people you care about, or as people at all. Considering that the driving force behind Blake’s decision to take his family into the woods for a vacation was him and his wife growing apart from each other…the trip further driving in the wedge via a physical manifestation of past paternal emotional neglect feels pointed.
However, I was really hoping to get a bit more concentration on what makes the transformation horrifying from this emotional standpoint. Instead, during the process of becoming the wolf man, we as an audience really only see the (admittedly wonderfully grotesque) physical transformation.
The moments when the perspective switches between Charlotte and Blake would have been perfect for this, maybe making it clear that as time goes on, his perception of his wife and daughter changes. Other than the loss of communication and an overall sharpening of the senses, not much really seems to change, and I feel that this is a missed opportunity – but this entire movie felt more like a missed opportunity than anything.
