Jonah Naplan   January 18, 2025

Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man” is a paralyzed picture. Anytime you think it’s going to do something truly gnarly, the movie holds back as if allergic to risks. A visually dark and musty horror outing, “Wolf Man” feels underdeveloped, like the script, co-written by Whannell and Corbett Tuck, was hastily tossed together just because Universal Pictures owns the rights to the title IP and felt obligated to make a movie out of it. The result is occasionally scary but often drearily, horribly boring, struggling to make out a plot amidst a central idea. Whannell proved his worth at this task just before Covid with his rattling modern-day adaptation of “The Invisible Man,” but he can’t quite seem to navigate the dark this time around.

The movie follows Blake (Christopher Abbott) and his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner). They’ve got a daughter named Ginger (Matilda Firth) and enough marriage problems to warrant a whole other movie about them. But “Wolf Man” can’t linger on nuptial conflict for too long before it’s announced that Blake’s pop (Sam Jaeger) is dead, and his cabin deep in the woods of Oregon is left to be packed up. And so, the family journeys to the Pacific Northwest, but not without encountering one of the sole residents of this eerie neighborhood who knew Blake’s father, and then suffering a horrendous crash that tilts their truck over a cliff after nearly colliding with a strange wolf-like figure in the road.

Blake gets bitten by the creature, and once the three of them manage to stumble into the house, he starts to turn into something viciously inhuman. You can guess what’s gonna happen next. I’ve always found it an intriguing thematic idea to have a child watch their parent transform into something animalistic that they cannot control. “Evil Dead Rise” did it exceptionally well. But “Wolf Man” never quite figures out how to communicate this tension effectively, wasting a lot of dead space before Blake’s wolf configuration assumes its full form.

It doesn’t help that you can barely see him. Cinematographer Stefan Duscio shoots everything in dim lighting, obscuring the characters and much of the central action. With the vast majority of the movie taking place at night, the dimly-lit house smack dab in the middle of the dark forest holds no intricacies because you can’t see them. There was potential here to play around with setting and create an uneasy environment for chaos to unfold, but it’s an impossible ploy to satisfy. By the same token, all of the characters feel underdeveloped on a script level, defined only by one or two traits that rhyme with the stereotypes we’ve come to expect from a horror plot about a reconciling family.

Most disappointing of the bunch is the young Firth, whose future work should definitely be looked out for, but whose character in “Wolf Man” is frustratingly one-dimensional. She’s the emotional device, an embodiment of the stakes. She’s no different from so many of the little kids we’ve seen in other movies of this genre, and the script makes no effort to give her anything more to do than run and hide, and scream bloody murder. In a similar lane, I’ve been a fan of Abbott for a while now (he was really excellent in a chamber piece from about two years ago called “Sanctuary”), but his transformation into the “wolf man” feels more like a CGI contraption than a human mutation. It’s hard to believe that it’s Abbott hidden behind all those effects, and harder yet for him to truly scare you because he’s not believable.

Garner has been similarly excellent in film and on television and will be starring in the upcoming “Fantastic Four” movie this summer, but the script betrays her character by neglecting to explore the hidden rage and nuances that lie within. Whannell seems to set up strong thematic ideas about conflict in marriage and learning to navigate life and coexist with your significant other in the movie’s early scenes but gives up near the midsection and never really returns to these ideas again, even though nothing any more exciting is going on. The only throughline of note in “Wolf Man” is an interesting parallel involving a treehouse that’s used in the beginning and at the end for the same purpose but under different circumstances. Other than that, a lot of this ultimately leads nowhere, and we’re left reeling from a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion that feels too abrupt.

I still have faith in Leigh Whannell. He’s proven himself to be more than adept at creating tension when given the right material, even if he falls short here. And I still have faith in the Universal Monsterverse (whatever that phrase means and what exactly it regards is sort of up to your interpretation at this point) for the exact same reasons. There’s claws here somewhere, but everyone involved just needs to overcome the stigma of taking a scratch.

Now playing in theaters.