They transform under a full moon. They can only be killed with a silver bullet. They sometimes consort with Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster (once, also, with comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello). Even if you’ve never seen a werewolf movie, you probably know the lore. Wolf Man (2025) dispenses with these conventions as vigorously as a dog chewing on a wounded paw. But more on that later.

Christopher Abbott (no relation to Bud Abbott) stars as Blake Lovell, a stay-at-home dad who lives in fear of turning into his short-tempered, overprotective father Grady (Sam Jaeger), from whom he has been estranged and who has recently gone missing. A war veteran, Grady raised Blake with the same strict discipline and survival skills he learned in the military, whereas Blake slightly spoils his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and feels guilty whenever he curses or even raises his voice in her presence. As Blake and Ginger develop a close relationship, Blake’s wife and Ginger’s mother Charlotte (Julia Garner) grows apart from the family, the film tells us, by focusing more on her career.

When Blake suddenly receives the news that Grady has been declared dead, he decides to take Charlotte and Ginger on what he hopes will be a family-bonding road-trip from San Francisco to rural Oregon, where he plans to pack up his abandoned childhood home. After losing their way and totaling their moving-van by almost hitting what appears to be a wild animal, the Lovells finally make it to the remote farmhouse, but not before the creature scratches Blake—giving him an “infection” that worsens over the night. Cooped up with Charlotte and Ginger, he gradually transforms into a werewolf, literalizing his worst fear of becoming a monster that threatens his wife and daughter.

The fifth entry in Universal Pictures’ recent slate of horror films featuring its classic monsters from the 1930s and 1940s, this in-name-only remake of The Wolf Man (1941) follows Abigail (2024), The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), Renfield (2023), and The Invisible Man (2020). It also comes out of a longtime partnership between Universal and low-budget horror producer Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions, the team responsible for the most successful of these films, The Invisible Man. Updating and relocating the setting of The Wolf Man to the present-day United States, Wolf Man ‘25 tells a different story with new characters, retaining only the broad premise of the original film: while working through unresolved conflicts with his stern father, a man contracts lycanthropy from a werewolf attack and fears killing the woman he loves once he transforms.
When Universal planned to include the Wolf Man in its “Dark Universe,” a would-be franchise of monster movies set in the same story-world, the studio hired Aaron Guzikowski to pen the first draft of the script and then Dave Callaham to rewrite it. In May of 2020, following the cancellation of the “Dark Universe,” it was announced that Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo wrote the script for a stand-alone Wolf Man film starring Ryan Gosling, based on his pitch to Universal. The Invisible Man’s writer-director Leigh Whannell came aboard to direct, but in October of 2021, it was reported that Derek Cianfrance replaced Whannell when the latter backed out due to scheduling conflicts. As a result of their own scheduling conflicts, both Gosling and Cianfrance exited late in 2023 (although Gosling still received an executive producer credit). Whannel returned to direct a script he co-authored with his wife Corbett Tuck and Abbott replaced Gosling as the star, and production raced to meet a release date of October 25, 2024.
Of course, the film was not released until January 17, 2025. If one didn’t know about the constant creative reshuffling and hurried shooting schedule, they might assume as much. The film’s portrayal of inter-generational family trauma is at best seriously confused. What is Grady’s “deal,” anyway? Whannell and Tuck seem to suggest that he had an Ahab-like obsession with hunting for the elusive werewolf that put young Blake’s life in danger as long as it was alive, but Grady never develops beyond a gun-toting hillbilly. What reason does Blake have to fear he will become a “monster” like his father, and what kind of monster is this, exactly? We see no real signs of abusive or self-destructive tendencies in Blake. He seems destined to inherit the ways of his father, hardly the most interesting or psychologically complex explanation.
Even more troubling is the judgement towards Charlotte as a cold career woman, a journalist whose identification with the urban professional sphere characterizes her as a bad wife and mother. As critical as the film wants to be of “toxic” masculinity, it also reinscribes traditional family values, making Charlotte’s workaholism a domestic problem that the story needs to solve. Blake’s physical degeneration is paralleled with Charlotte’s spiritual regeneration as she leaves the city for the country and learns to take care of her daughter. The closure brought by the film’s final shot of a beautiful natural landscape implies that “everything will be okay” now that Charlotte has become a pioneer woman, a homesteader.
What the film does exceptionally well, however, is reimagining lycanthropy as a degenerative disease, an idea latent in the 1941 film, but explicitly and effectively realized here. According to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Whannell wanted to make a film about “losing someone you love to illness and not being able to talk to them anymore.” He explained that he “had a close personal friend who died of ALS [Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis],” describing the experience as “a slow-motion nightmare,” both “tragic and horrific,” that “took place over many years.” A scene he ultimately deleted even revealed Blake’s mother as a woman suffering from ALS.

Instead of relying heavily on CGI like Universal’s Van Helsing (2004) or The Wolfman (2010), this more grounded film makes impressive use of practical effects to show the transformation as an agonizing process, all the more so because it is especially prolonged. Prosthetics & Special Makeup Effects Designer Arjen Tuiten has cited David Cronenberg’s “body horror” classic The Fly (1986) as a “big reference,” telling Bloody Disgusting that Whannell wanted to see a werewolf different from the hairy monsters of previous films. Tuiten said he instead created the appearance of “something where human anatomy meets the wolf or dog-like anatomy, which is a painful mix.” And the film is certainly not for the squeamish. Yes, at one point, Blake gnaws at the deep, bloody gash that the werewolf leaves in his arm.
When so many monster movies since the 1980s have either taken a jokey approach to their material or confined their intended audience to an adolescent demographic (remember The Monster Squad [1987]?), I can’t help but admire Wolf Man’s dark, stripped-down approach, returning the character to its origins in horror. Abbott recalls the hangdog believability of Lon Chaney Jr. in the 1941 film, holding this remake together, for all of its flaws. Critics who are complaining that Whannell’s Wolf Man isn’t “fun” enough have missed the point. What’s fun about being a werewolf? These creatures are supposed to be sad, and we rarely see that anymore.