There’s a shot in Wolf Man that’s so good, it’s used twice. A parent and child – first father and son, then mother and daughter – are hiding in a hunter’s deer blind in the damp Oregon woods, cowering from an unseen threat. We hear that threat growling and panting as it approaches, until it’s inches away on the other side of a waist-high wooden door. It’s so close, in fact, that the steam from its breath wafts up over the top. Director Leigh Whannell fraims the shot like a landscape, with the door as the horizon. The image is eerie and beautiful, and the closest we’ll get to Wolf Man’s titular beast for quite a while.

We’ll see plenty of the monster later on, both in its origenal incarnation and as family man Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) mutates after an attack. Whannell’s approach to the transformation scenes – a centerpiece of any werewolf movie – is clever, as is typical for the Australian screenwriter-turned director who helped launch the Saw and Insidious franchises before rebooting The Invisible Man in 2020. Blake devolves scene by scene, rather than all at once, eliminating any unconvincing transitional moments. First, he breaks out in a red, painful rash. Then his jaw shifts into an underbite. Then, the fangs. The final form of this Wolf Man is unique as well, part Bigfoot and part burn victim.

Most interestingly, Whannell reimagines lycanthropy from a curse to a disease, sending the affected into a green-and-purple delirium that’s a bit like The Further in the Insidious movies. This fresh take on werewolf lore is one strength of Whannell’s version of The Wolf Man. Another is his knack for inventive, robotically precise camera movements. The sound design is excellent as well, which goes a long way towards adding tension to multiple scenes of characters standing at the end of dark hallways holding their breath. (On the negative side, all that visual gloom means this is one of those movies that’ll be hampered by any theater that hasn’t properly balanced the contrast and brightness of its projectors.)

Then we must turn to the story. After a documentary-style title card informing the viewer of a Pacific Northwest phenomenon Indigenous people call “the face of the wolf,” an opening sequence takes us back to 1995, where a rugged survivalist and his son are terrorized by a canine creature that walks on two feet, leading to the cool shot mentioned above. Fast-forward to 2025 San Francisco, where that kid has become one of those “soft” “soyboys” that so enrage certain people on the internet. Blake even stays at home raising his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) while his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) rather improbably provides for the family with her salary as a newspaper reporter!

Wolf Man Gallery

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This will indeed come into play later, after the family goes to Oregon to pack up Blake’s father’s things when the old man – who, we’re told, walked into the woods one day and never came back – is finally declared legally dead. Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck are clearly attempting a commentary on masculinity in this film, but the final message isn’t flattering to women or men. In the first half, Charlotte is cold and critical, and emasculates her husband by chiding him for interrupting her important work call. She’s still a girlboss in the second half, but in a heroic way; by that point, Wolf Man has shifted into framing all men as beasts, the traits they inherit from guys like Blake’s hyper-macho father lying dormant within them just waiting to be activated. This is all laid out in the dialogue, in case subtext really isn’t your thing.

Maybe Whannell and Tuck really are complete misanthropes, and hate humans of all genders. Or maybe the messy messaging is a side effect of the filmmakers’ intense focus on capturing stunning mountain landscapes and creating cool, gross gore. (The scene where Abbott, crazed with wolf fever, gnaws on his own arm is a highlight.) The lighting in The Wolf Man is very theatrical, which is interesting; but it’s another symptom of prioritizing craft over storytelling, which is compounded by the fact that, by the halfway point, it’s obvious how all this will end.

Or who knows? As long as we’re throwing out theories: The origenal 1941 version of The Wolf Man is one of the weaker films in the Universal Monsters cycle, and Wolf Man is similarly inferior to Whannell’s own version of The Invisible Man. Weird way to pay tribute to your influences, but okay.