Leigh Whannell's 'Wolf Man' is a Nasty Little Punk Song of Body Horror
Puking fingers, puking blood / GO TO WOODS AND KILL YOUR DAD! GO TO WOODS AND KILL YOUR DAD!
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I can imagine what you’re thinking: A Wolf Man movie? Do we really need one of those in 2025? Once we’ve established that he has nards, what else is left to discover?
Probably we don’t need a Wolf Man movie, but Universal has been trying to capitalize on their “Universal Monsters” IP (which includes characters like Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) since the phrase “expanded universe” first escaped an exec’s lips some time back in the early 2010s. Universal’s own effort to jump on the bandwagon began with the so-forgettable-I-had-to-Google-to-remember-if-I’d-seen-it Dracula Untold, in 2014. It continued with a movie so bad that it temporarily torpedoed the entire endeavor, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy from 2017, which cost $125 million to make and at least had the decency to be memorably bad. (An entire scene introducing Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde was completely superfluous to the plot).
Then Universal seemingly stumbled upon an actual winning strategy: farming out its monsters to indie horror label Blumhouse, and turning their catalogue into grounded, lower-budgeted horror films, starting with 2020’s The Invisible Man — directed by Leigh Whannell, previously the director of Upgrade and co-writer of the original Saw, with his film school buddy, James Wan.
In this first installment/proof of concept, Whannell turned the title character into an evil tech magnate using invisibility technology to menace an ex-girlfriend in what was basically the ultimate gaslighting thriller (which seems more believable with every news cycle driven by Zuck or Elon pettiness). The Invisible Man was timely, and it slapped, eventually earning $144 million worldwide: or, 20x its $7 million budget, whereas The Mummy only made 3.2x on $125 million. Whannell and Wan sometimes seem like the only two major studio guys still capable of making fun schlock, with appeal that isn’t based on winks or ironic humor. With Whannell, it’s mostly just viscerally appealing movies done well, with only purity of purpose elevating them above the norm.
The success of The Invisible Man bought Whannell the keys to Wolf Man, opening this week. What might’ve been a poisoned chalice to some is a big cup of Fuck You for Whannell and his co-writer/wife Corbett Tuck, who use the “monster” premise to riff on fatherhood, tainted legacy, and especially the idea of incurable degenerative disease.
If that sounds less “fun” than Invisible Man or Upgrade, broadly speaking that’s correct. You’re probably not going to leave Wolf Man skipping, which is generally true of any movie that feels like a sneaky metaphor for Alzheimer’s Disease. Wolf Man doesn’t end with a big cure, which makes it less of a romp, but also honest, and a commitment to emotional honesty is most of what distinguishes Whannell from his peers.
Don’t go in expecting a happy ending and you probably won’t be disappointed. Because what Wolf Man does offer is arguably better anyway: the kind of uncompromising gory body horror that had me squirming in my seat and giggling simultaneously. What Whannell presupposes is, maybe a movie about a wolf man should be kind of gross.
Wolf Man is a movie for people who like getting kicked in the teeth for 90 minutes, almost as much a hardcore show as it is a movie. The plot would even make a great hardcore song. Puking fingers, puking blood / GO TO WOODS AND KILL YOUR DAD! GO TO WOODS AND KILL YOUR DAD!
Christopher Abbott, who once played Marnie’s gentle boyfriend on Girls and has since become the arthouse movie equivalent of a rock solid utility infielder (he hits for average, hits for power - real five tool guy) plays Blake. We meet Blake as a child, trying to please his demanding, ex-military father, with whom he lives in an isolated farmhouse deep in the woods of rural Oregon (with a set that looks uncannily like the Blumhouse logo).
The two are hunting, with father frequently admonishing son to lock in and stop daydreaming. Death comes easy out here in the wilds. Eventually they happen upon a “thing” in the woods, the embodiment of an old campfire tale with an Indian name that translates to “the Face of the Wolf.” The make it out alive, and Blake’s father vows to protect his son from that wolf thing.
Fast forward to the present, when Blake is an out-of-work writer living in San Francisco (actually shot in Wellington, New Zealand), with his fancy journalist wife, Charlotte (ramen-haired Julia Garner, from Ozark) and preteen daughter, Ginger. In an early scene, Ginger has scary encounter with a street person and Blake overreacts — an urban echo of Blake’s own childhood in the woods. “A parent wants so badly to protect his children from being scarred that he becomes the thing that scars,” Blake says later, the movie’s nut graf if ever there was one.
Blake soon finds out that his father has been declared dead and plans a family trip to rural Oregon, to go get his father’s things in order, and also maybe spend some quality time with the family away from the stresses of work and day-to-day life. Taking your wife and daughter off the grid to some scary wolf-infested woods for perspective — great idea, dumbass! You spend your whole life trying to protect your children from wolves and one day you accidentally lock them in the wolf’s lair, whaddddddyaaaagoonnnnadoo, am I right!
Wolf Man only has about one scene set in the woods before things really go to shit, which in some ways is a shame, because Whannell is truly excellent at shooting this setting in a way that evokes quiet menace. Blake finds an old acquantaince on the isolated road to his isolated old farm house, and the whole ride is a masterclass in “is this guy helpful country folk or an inbred Deliverance-style predator, come to get his revenge on representatives of a modern world that’s passed him by?”
I don’t think it’s too spoilery to acknowledge that Blake eventually becomes “the Wolf Man,” in a transformation that Whannell slow plays for maximum body horror gnarliness. You go in expecting some of the traditional stuff about full moons and silver bullets, and what you get instead is truly disturbing transformations that leave you both viscerally shaken by convincing gore and genuinely concerned for the principal characters. I’m surprised they didn’t market this using crowd footage shots of early screenings (a lá Paranormal Activity). There were times when the entire audience physically recoiled in unison. If I were Whannell, I’d find critics who gave me middling reviews and confront them with video of them full-body wincing. This you?