Hungry Like the...

Film: The Wolf Man (2025)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Aside from the studio execs at Universal, there are few people who want the Dark Universe project to succeed more than I do. I love the classic Universal monsters, and have watched most of the movies and sequels, and I even have some affection for the terrible movies in the sequences. Universal has had several abortive attempts to reboot the monsters. The current attempt is five movies in. I’ve now seen four of them, since I just watched The Wolf Man from this year.

This was kind of a make-or-break for me in a sense. The Tom Cruise version of The Mummy is absolute hot garbage. The rebooted The Invisible Man is as good as the Tom Cruise movie is bad (and that’s saying a lot). Abigail isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fun one, and that counts for something. I still haven’t seen Renfield. So, the Dark Universe is (for me so far) one clear win, one sort of win, and one absolute thrashing. The Wolf Man, then, would give me either a net-good or net-negative for the entire franchise at the moment.

And the results aren’t great. There’s a lot that The Wolf Man wants to be, and it seems to fail at most of it. It has all of the trappings of a werewolf movie, but lacks most of what makes a typical werewolf movie really interesting. Lon Chaney Jr. was successful as Larry Talbot specifically because he was pitiable. Larry Talbot was a victim far more than he was a monster, and while there are aspects of that in our wolfman-to-be, Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott), there’s so little of a connection to him in the audience that any potential pathos fails.

We start with Blake as a child (Zac Chandler in these early scenes), living in the middle of nowhere, Oregon. Blake doesn’t really seem like the mountain man that his father (Sam Jaeger) is, much to both of their frustration. One day, while hunting, Blake’s father spots something out in the forest. They return home quickly and he radios out to others what he’s seen. There’s definitely a sense that what he thinks he saw was something not natural, or at least not so normal.

We jump thirty years into the future and discover Blake now lives in San Francisco where he sometimes works as a writer. He spends most of his time raising his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), partly because he doesn’t seem to work a lot and partly because his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) does nothing but work. Their marriage feels a little rocky, but not in actual trouble—it’s manufactured, plot-necessary “trouble” more than anything else. One day, Blake gets a letter that tells him his father has been declared dead. Blake convinces Charlotte they should spend the summer clearing out his father’s cabin in the Oregon woods, a place without really any electricity outside of private generators and without much in the way of cell service.

You know what’s going to happen, right? The family is attacked by a creature. Blake is wounded, and over the last hour or so of the film (not including the extensive credit sequence), he’s going to slow change into something like a wolf while both protecting his family from what attacked him and being tempted to attack them himself.

While a lot of this works on the surface, the actual execution of the film leaves a lot to be desired, and that’s disappointing when it comes to a director like Leigh Whannell, who has had a really good track record up to this point. One of the bigger issues is the fact that, aside from the first few bits, all of this takes place in a single night. From the minute we see the family in the car headed to Oregon, we’re looking at everything taking place in less than 24 hours, and it feels too fast. Our transformation from normal guy to lycanthrope goes too quickly.

A second issue is the reaction of Charlotte and Ginger to Blake’s transformation from human into something else. This is treated as “Daddy is sick” and not “Daddy is clearly growing hair, acting like an animal, and having fangs growing in.” Sure, they’re scared, but they aren’t treating this like the fact that Blake is literally transforming into something else in front of their eyes. At one point, while trying to get away from the farmhouse from the monster still trying to kill them and get some help for Blake, Charlotte puts both her clearly sick, possibly feral, and likely contagious husband in the car with her daughter and then pops open the hood and leaves them unsupervised.

The biggest issue, though, is a complete lack of chemistry between anyone in the film. We’re told that Blake has some anger issues and that Charlotte is a workaholic, and that because of this, their marriage is in trouble. The truth is that their marriage is in trouble because they clearly don’t like each other or have anything in common. None of these people belong together, not as a family, not as friends, not as neighbors.

The Wolf Man is ultimately a failure on pretty much all fronts. The Dark Universe really needs a second win, but it’s not coming from here.

Why to watch The Wolf Man: The Universal Dark Universe is at least potentially worth having.
Why not to watch: It’s not worth having if this is what the movies are going to be.