I watched Wolf Man (2025) (not to be confused with The Wolfman) and thought I'd review it. This review contains minor spoilers, but then again so does the movie's title.
This movie has what's regarded as a venerable horror movie setup: A small cast is sequestered in an isolated cabin in the woods. What could possibly go wrong? That's the main question for the first half of the movie, in fact. What exactly is going to go wrong?
The movie spends a good amount of time on misdirection, to the extent that I wonder whether the movie's title was subject to a last minute change. I don't feel like the script writer could have possibly wanted the title to give away the big monster reveal, because the script is obviously designed to manipulate. At first, you suspect an anomalous forest spirit, or maybe some kind of Bigfoot or Wendigo. Hunters see it through trees, never quite able to get a complete view of it. They talk about it over ham radio, they debate it, and nobody seems sure what it is or whether it even truly exists. We see this through the eyes of a young Blake (Zac Chandler), an emotionally abused child who's been brought up by a paranoid single father who seems to think he's in the movie Predator.
Except this is a horror movie, so actually the paranoid single father is right.
Fast forward to Blake as an adult (Christopher Abbott), who's living a normal life in a normal city with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). He's working hard to not be a psychopath like his own dad, but his marriage is on the rocks and his father has been missing for years. Word comes in that his dad's been missing long enough now to be declared officially dead, so he suggests to Charlotte that, as a kind of retreat, the whole family go to his dad's cabin and clear it out.
The next apparent threat is Derek, a hunter living in the mountains. He's got just enough of a creepy edge to convince you immediately that actually he's the subject of the title. He's the predator. Blake, in dire need of directions through the woods, invites him into the moving truck with his wife and preteen daughter.
That only lasts long enough for you to imagine a whole different movie, in which Derek harasses and taunts the family until breaking completely and hunting them down. But that's not this movie. They reach the cabin, but only after being chased through the woods by something. Blake receives a pretty bad gash on his arm, but adrenaline keeps him going long enough to barricade his family into the cabin. The monster is at the door, but for the moment they're safe.
That's when Blake falls ill. His injury acts less like a cut and more like a disease. It's a long and painful process, which we witness both from Blake's perspective and from the perspective of Charlotte and Ginger.
As ever, the central struggle in the film is the victim's sense of humanity against his own bestial nature. How long can Blake ward off the disease that seems to be turning him into a savage beast, causing him to forget his feelings for Charlotte and Ginger? How can he live up to the ideal he has set for himself to not be like his own father?
I think many of us can relate to that last bit. I've known a good number of people, including myself, who spend a lot of energy not to become their parents. I've known many who ought to have spent more energy on it. At best, it's a search for progress. At worst, as in this movie, it's a struggle against regression.
In this movie it's also, obviously, a primal struggle. Blake is human, and does not want to be, literally or figuratively, inhuman. He doesn't want to harm the ones he loves. His transition is slow and painful, and disorienting and confusing. Nobody understands what's happening, at least not at first. Charlotte figures it out eventually, and it's not like in the [other] movies. There's no ritual you can perform to expel a demon, there's no magic item to wear to keep the beast within. Blake is becoming a wolf man, turned by his own father. There's no way back. He has lost the battle.
You don't see many werewolf movies, and I don't actively consider myself as a werewolf fan, but I have to admit that I've invariably enjoyed the werewolf fiction and movies I've encountered. Maybe because I'm planning a werewolf-focused Expedition to Castle Ravenloft adventure for Halloween, but I enjoyed this movie. There's something unique about the horror and struggle of werewolves compared to vampires and zombies and other tropes. This one's a good entry into that canon.
Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash