Wolf Man

Grade: B-

Blumhouse has dropped an early-year horror thriller on us for at least the last two Januarys. Wolf Man is a marked improvement over 2024’s Night Swim and 2023’s M3GAN. Director Leigh Whannell was the man behind the camera for 2020’s The Invisible Man, which resonated with lots of people, and I thought it was great. One may wonder if Whannell’s dealing in classic horror characters will become a motif. Will he have a Frankenstein or Mummy movie coming one day? We’ll see.

Wolf Man opens with a day in the life of a seemingly single dad and his young son Blake (an only child). They live in a remote cabin in the mountains. Sam Jaeger (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, American Sniper) plays Grady, the father, with intensity, firmness, and military precision. Their daily hunting trips are in pursuit of some sort of cunning and elusive animal.

Cut to 30 years later. Blake is grown up, and played with the Everyman charm of Christopher Abbott (Poor Things). He lives in the city with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (10-year-old Matilda Firth, one of the better child actors I’ve seen recently). Blake receives word that his estranged father, who never left the mountains, is deceased. The three of them make the trek up there to clear out his belongings.

After a well-filmed vehicle mishap, Blake is bitten by…something, and I bet you know where this is going. He is starting to “turn.” There’s a laugh to be had – of the “WTF am I watching” variety – when his appetite becomes peculiar. These aren’t the most well-developed characters in the world, but they have chemistry. I could believe they were a family. If you don’t know who Julia Garner is, you should. She is quite talented, and starred in two interesting, memorable movies in the last half decade: The Royal Hotel and The Assistant. She’ll be playing Madonna in an upcoming biopic, and that’s easy to envision.

The characters in Wolf Man make questionable decisions like climbing on top of a greenhouse (trapping themselves up there) and hiding in a barn – but then again, I’ve never been chased by a werewolf. We don’t see the titular animal for a while, and once we finally do, it’s easy to understand why it was kept from us for so long, and masked with dark lighting. I did enjoy the transitions into what it looks and sounds like from Wolf Blake’s point of view. Stranger Things fans will recognize a potential homage.

The ending takes place in the exact same spot as the opening sequence, coming full circle in a forced way. It’s sunrise/daylight by this point, which doesn’t do the makeup – which already wasn’t great – any favors. By the end, though, Wolf Man had more that I liked than disliked. There’s some ridiculous campy fun to be had, the locations are lovely, Julia Garner is a unique kind of pretty, and I have a thing for women in flannel shirts. Your intelligence won’t be insulted if you leave it at the door.

Grade: B-