SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Wolf Man. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
While I would not argue that writer/director Leigh Whannell’s Invisible Man is a perfect film, I would argue that it’s built on a perfect approach. The assignment was to take the horror icon that is the titular character and update his story for the 21st century, and that’s exactly what the 2020 movie does. The setting, point of view and themes are changed from the 1933 version starring Claude Rains, but it drinks from the same pool as far as the classic Universal Monster is concerned: a mad scientist named Griffin discovers the ability to turn himself invisible and uses his ability to unleash a campaign of terror.
It was this perfect approach that for months wholly propped up my expectations and hopes for Whannell’s Wolf Man (even after the disastrous first look)… but one might argue that primed me for disappointment when I finally got to see it. As I wrote about in my CinemaBlend review of the movie, there are things that I liked in addition to the multiple things I didn’t, but after wholly adjusting the feature following its opening weekend, there is one thing above all else that continues to really bother me about it: simply put, it’s not a werewolf movie.
This isn’t an argument of semantics a la the discussion about whether or not 28 Days Later qualifies as a zombie movie because the mindless, cannibalistic hordes aren’t undead. There is generally nothing wrong with creatives applying their own vision and putting a new spin on genre traditions. (As a perfect example, I love that 2020’s Invisible Man utilizes a suit of advanced optics technology instead of the character downing what amounts to a magic elixir.) The problem with Wolf Man is two-fold, in that it first guts all mythology beyond infection and lupine-esque transformation, and then also opts to disregard its connection to the greater lore that is the specific history of Universal Monsters.
Where Are The Werewolves?
If one were to approach random people on the street and ask what a werewolf is, you’d get lightly altered versions of the same answer: an ordinary person is either bitten or scratched to become cursed, and when they periodically morph into ferocious, feral, and furry beasts with the rising of a full moon, the only way to kill them is with silver. The transformation is a metaphor representing the duality that exists in all people (to put it into Freudian terms, the id versus the superego), and it’s because of this timeless idea that the mythos has existed for thousands of years. And yet, Wolf Man opts to put that aside for reasons that I can’t totally fathom – instead opting to tell a story about generational trauma and family that is never able to click together with the monster mayhem in a satisfying way.
Having the majority of the plot take place over a single night allows the film to dwell on the horror of the metamorphosis, and it’s certainly cool to see the developing symptoms expressed by Christopher Abbott’s Blake – from enhanced senses, to communication breakdown, to extreme physical change – but there is far too much lost in not seeing how the character’s personality and relationships are impacted by the curse. Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck want us to meditate on the emotional struggle the protagonist deals with as he returns to his childhood home and is forced to consider how his traumatic childhood with his survivalist father impacts his bond with his pre-teen daughter, but the narrative proves incompatible with the message. Perhaps if there were a few full moons to cycle through…
But even that may not be the proper solution for this movie given that it seems once the transformation starts, there is stopping it, and there is no transformation back. There is no overt discussion of the supernatural in general let alone a discussion about the long history of werewolf mythology, further expanding the gap between Wolf Man and the audience expectation for a lycanthrope.
Can It Really Be Called A Part Of The Universal Monsters Legacy?
It also is an aspect of the film that further distances itself from George Waggner’s The Wolf Man from 1941, a movie where characters can’t stop, won’t stop talking about werewolves – which segues nicely into a focus on what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, a branding issue. In Hollywood history, werewolves are a dime a dozen, but there is only one Wolf Man that exists as a pillar of the legacy that is the Universal Monsters. But that icon is never actually represented in the 2025 release, and that’s a big bummer. If the exact same script were produced by another studio, perhaps retitling it something like The Face Of The Wolf, you’d never make an association, and Universal could never present a copyright infringement claim in court.
Surely, this is at least partially attributable to the last time that Universal made a Wolf Man movie. Director Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman from 2010 is a case of a modern feature not taking enough creative liberties with the source material, but the problem is not that it’s a bad film (it’s not), but that it was a massive flop (a $150 million production that made $142 million worldwide, per The Numbers). With Whannell’s Wolf Man produced by the microbudget kings at Blumhouse, that kind of box office disaster was never going to happen with the 2025 release, but I wonder about lingering trauma at the studio that may have had an overt impact of creative development.
As a film critic, I typically try to judge movies more based on what they are instead of what they aren’t, but Wolf Man is a special and disappointing case. Call it an over-swing or an over-correction, the movie was always going to be impacted by expectations from genre aficionados, and it falls short of standards even while executing some brilliant special effects and standout sequences (a particular favorite being that killer spider scene). Weird as it feels to say, my hope is that the future of Universal Monsters sees a more significant effort to take things back to the basics.