With The Invisible Man, filmmaker Leigh Whannell proved he could craft a sleek psychological horror movie that pays homage to the Universal Monsters while finding new ways for the brand to stay relevant. By comparison, Wolf Man is a massive disappointment; Whannell’s latest doesn’t know what it wants to say, suffers from uneven special effects, and the dialogue is subpar to the point that it’s hard to believe the same creative mind helmed both projects. 3d3z58

Wolf Man revolves around a family of three: Blake (Christopher Abbott), his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their infant daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). When Blake’s father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), is officially declared dead after having disappeared into the woods years before the movie’s main events, Blake takes Charlotte and Ginger to his childhood home. In addition to packing Grady’s stuff to empty the place, the trip is an opportunity for the family to spend quality time together, far away from the city’s noise. As expected, things go south when they are attacked by a mysterious creature, with Blake contracting a disease that slowly transforms him into something inhuman.

Set in Oregon’s wilderness, Wolf Man plays with the idea of isolation to amp up the tension and trap its characters inside a never-ending nightmare. The concept is solid, and Wolf Man should have been another hit for Whannell and Universal. Instead, this is a forgettable horror flick that fails to leave a mark in the werewolf subgenre.

The most frustrating aspect of Wolf Man is its inability to embrace the outstanding emotional hook it teases in the movie’s first arc. In the opening scenes, we witness the warped childhood young Blake (Zac Chandler) had to endure. It would be easy to paint Blake’s father as a villain, yet Wolf Man shows there is genuine love beneath his strict demeanor and acts of violence. Unsurprisingly, Blake grows up to be the opposite of his stern father, showering his daughter with love and affection. 

That doesn’t solve things. In doing what he believes is best for Ginger’s safety and happiness, Blake risks scaring the girl, albeit in different ways than his own father had. That’s the human core that should have centered Wolf Man. The movie gives audiences a peek at the impossible task of parenthood, showing how even the healthiest human relationships contain a fair dose of anger ready to burst into something monstrous. It wouldn’t be much to compare the thematic ambitions of Wolf Man with those of classics like The Babadook and Under the Shadow.  Unfortunately, the promise remains unfulfilled, as the film drags itself to the credits with a handful of half-baked scares while ignoring the human elements that make its first arc so enticing.

Adding a layer of disaster to the whole affair, the editing of Wolf Man raises questions about whether the version that ended up in theaters truly reflects Whannell’s vision. For starters, there are weird time jumps between scenes — in one particular instance, the sudden change in daylight is nothing short of baffling. Plus, the characters have reactions that contradict the main personality traits they defined just moments before, as if they underwent emotional developments that didn’t get caught on camera. Finally, some expositional dialogue was shoved in the middle of the movie, seemingly because someone has decided audiences are too dumb for subtlety.

After the fluidity of The Invisible Man, the choppiness of Wolf Man is so appalling that it might be explained by studio interference. In Wolf Man, Whannell also shared script duties with Corbett Tuck, while the director was the sole writer of The Invisible Man. So, this could be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Whatever the causes, the result never gets better than an average B-movie, even though some genuinely good ideas were added to the mix.

To a certain extent, what Wolf Man does get right is body horror. Throughout one evening, Blake’s lycanthropy progressively strips him of his humanity, pushing him away from his family.  The camera shows the transformation in detail, with teeth falling and claws breaking Blake’s flesh and ripping his nails, in a revolting spectacle that tries to showcase the brutality of the werewolf curse.

Parallel to the painful changes in his body, Blake must also come to with his warped senses. Whispers become too loud for him to bear, and his vision gradually gets adjusted to the night, to the point where even other people’s eyes look like flashlights for him. Sadly, the visual effects accompanying Blake’s change of perception look like cheap mobile app filters, more often than not diminishing the impact of the werewolf-vision scenes. Plus, as Wolf Man has a serious problem with uneven lighting, the shift is less impactful than it deserves to be.

One of the movie’s most significant strokes of genius relates to its use of language. As Blake’s transformation accelerates, he loses the ability to understand what Charlotte and Ginger say. To him, they are just speaking nonsense, while the humans hear Blake’s words as undistinguishable grunts. The ability to speak is one of the main things separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, so it makes sense that the ability to convey meaning is impaired by lycanthropy. After all, the myth of the werewolf plays with our fears that a beast is hiding inside us, a creature of primal urges no longer contained by the façade of humanity.

Wolf Man’s moments of brilliance are not enough to save the project, though, especially since the cast is mostly wasted. Abbott is the movie’s highlight, delivering a layered version of a man struggling to accept his traumatic past and build a better future. However, once his transformation kicks off, he’s relegated to the role of a predator, even when it doesn’t make sense for him to embrace villainy. 

As for Garner, she doesn’t seem invested in the project, and is mostly just standing there and reading her lines out loud. To be fair, her character is written as such a one-dimensional drag that it’s hard to blame her for not being committed to the part. The young Firth also needed better direction to shine, as her contributions are uneven, and her character is most used as a gimmick to justify many of Wolf Man’s confrontations.

Worst of all, Wolf Man never gets particularly scary or thrilling. It’s perfectly possible to make an excellent horror movie without worrying too much about subtext. Still, in this case, we get some tiresome horror tropes that include survivors making dumb decisions just for the sake of another set piece, while Whannell tries to hammer down a motif that never gets properly explored. Stuck in the middle, Wolf Man fails as a character study and engaging entertainment, adding another failure to Universal’s long list of botched attempts to capitalize on its classic monsters.

If you take a stroll into any online space populated by an emerging cinema-head (pejorative), you’ll often hear some grotesquely pessimistic soundbyte about the death of cinema. And look, I get it; the pandemic wasn’t particularly kind to movie theaters, and seeing any amount of anti-creative glut make it to the big screen is wickedly disheartening.

But folks, cinema is far from dead; the fact that the Barbenheimer phenomenon took off the way it did is a testament to that. And while there’s something to be said about seeing a movie for the movie rather than seeing it for the memes or the FOMO that it dangles over your head, the boundless success of movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer are cultural boons whose value should not be discounted.

With that being said, key to the charm and mileage of Barbenheimer was how organic the whole event was. There was no studio push, and there were no actors urging this particular double-feature; Barbenheimer was entirely a product of the zeitgeist and the internet’s dedication to the subsequent memes, and the self-sufficient joy of it all was evident.

That’s why no one is well and truly responding to any of the Barbenheimer-coded trends that have popped up in the months since. September of that same year saw a woefully misguided push for Saw Patrol (comprised of a Saw X and Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie double-feature), and now Q4 of this year is coming at us with the likes of Glicked (Gladiator II and Wicked), Babyratu (A24’s erotic thriller Babygirl and Robert Eggers’ gothic horror tentpole Nosferatu), and Wolfington (Wolf Man and Paddington in Peru).

But let’s break this down a bit. Of these four Barbenheimer imitators, only half of them can claim to work, and that half ittedly have particularly strong claims. But, it should be noted right up front that even the best double-feature memes fundamentally cannot compete with the organic roots of Barbenheimer.

This is because Barbenheimer set a precedent that will always be considered the gold standard of these double-feature memes. Even if Glicked, for example, had been coined by someone who was completely unaware of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, the comparison would be unavoidable, thereby negating the novelty of Glicked as an event and losing a large portion of the thrust it would need to get anywhere near Barbenheimer’s level.

But here’s the other thing; it wasn’t Barbie and Oppenheimer‘s differences that made them such a good pairing, but rather the similarities within those heavy contrasts. Both are major blockbusters from powerhouse filmmakers with loads of talent and backing behind them, and both films are rooted in existential anxiety experienced by the eponymous protagonist of either picture. And despite Barbie being technically based on an IP, it’s an original, standalone film in every way that matters, and despite Oppenheimer‘s R-rating, it’s not so viscerally graphic that it would alienate too many people. Both films, then, are perfect as complete and utter protagonists of cinema; that’s key.

Saw Patrol and Wolfington have no such merits together. Both are merely instances of films that happen to have a same-day release, and happen to contrast with each other in cheeky and ironic ways. Wolfington lacks the creative star power and inter-film chemistry (Paddington in Peru only works precisely because of its all-ages, wholesome sincerity, which an association with a Blumhouse horror flick like Wolf Man would undermine), and Saw Patrol doubles down on both of those things while also occupying two different extremes of filmmaking (a very young children’s film, and a horrifying gorefest) that simply can’t anchor audiences.

Glicked and Babyratu do not have these problems. Babyratu’s clunky name loses it a few points, as does Babygirl‘s lack of blockbuster energy, but intimate and unnerving power dynamics are the name of the game for both Babygirl and Nosferatu; it just so happens that one has a CEO Nicole Kidman romancing a handsome young intern, and one has a legendary vampire Bill Skarsgård obsessing over a haunted young woman.

Glicked, meanwhile, is an out-and-out worthy successor to Barbenheimer, with only its unavoidably stiff engineering among its faults. Both Gladiator II and Wicked are massive blockbusters with powerhouse credits that, on paper, couldn’t be more different; one is a fantasy musical set in the bubbly Land of Oz, the other is a historical action film set amidst the dusty industrialism of ancient Rome. In practice, though, they’re one in the same, as the corresponding heroes battle against the oppressive and corrupt systems that rule the land. Moreover, Gladiator II‘s status as a sequel and Wicked‘s status as an adaptation puts it on equal but separate footing in the realm of creativity, and equal-but-separate is the crux of good double-features.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you properly honor the Barbenheimer phenomenon going forward; not by grabbing the first too goofily incompatible films that happen to fall on the same release date, but by finding the same-day releases who would find kinship and respect in one another at the behest of their shared values, artistic prestige, and confidence to stylistically contrast one another.

Gladiator II and Wicked hack, slash, glide, and incant their way into cinemas on Nov. 27. Babygirl and Nosferatu, meanwhile, will chillingly court us all on Christmas Day.

Given the rather shoddy history of Universal’s attempt to reboot their lineup of classic monsters for the modern age, 2025’s Wolf Man needed to get off on the right foot. Hiring Leigh Whannell as writer-director was one such right foot, but it was a foot that Blumhouse promptly shot not too long ago, thanks to a promotional pop-up featuring the film’s titular beast.

Putting aside the obvious fact that revealing the monster ahead of the film’s release is a bad move, the look of the creature itself had the internet questioning Blumhouse’s grasp on elementary zoology. Thus, a pivot had to be made, and that pivot has come in the form of the film’s actual trailer. And honestly? Everything is forgiven.

It’s a somewhat unorthodox trailer; an underplayed opening filled with insects minding their own business until they’re not. Their stagnant noise plays up an ominous tone rather than a frenzied one. And the big standout: a series of stylized slashes that remain over the frame, slowly piling up until they spell out the title of the film. It seems that this particular reboot has taken some notes from Alien, and at least as far as marketing goes, there are far worse choices.

What’s also worth noting is the lack of the monster in the trailer itself, despite the antagonist’s form having apparently been revealed already. This monsterless trailer suggests that the costume we saw at the pop-up isn’t the Wolf Man’s actual form, or at least not his final one, and it seems much more likely now that a more proper Wolf Man design is very much still on the table.

Similarly, the trailer doesn’t give too much away in of the film’s narrative workings. It’s been readily apparent for some time now that Christopher Abbott‘s character, Blake — who seeks to protect his family from a werewolf — is, himself, the werewolf in question. It’s also no surprise — by the very nature of this being a movie — that the family is going to get plunged into quite a bit of peril; physically on of the threat of the werewolf, and emotionally on of the werewolf being the father.

But, importantly, we don’t quite know what the dynamics are, nor in how many ways this tension is going to manifest. Will the family have to make a choice between saving the father and killing the werewolf? How might the daughter reconcile the emotional fallout of a father who loves her suddenly trying to kill her? How will the whole thing inevitably play with classic werewolf motifs?

Well, with this trailer, we’re actually interested in finding out now, and all will be revealed when Wolf Man hits theaters on Jan. 17, 2025. Nice job on the course correction, Blumhouse.

Blumhouse has been having a rough go of things lately. Oct. 6 of 2023 was the last time the production house birthed a good film in Totally Killer; a release date that also happened to coincide with stomach-churningly bad The Exorcist: Believer.

Since then, Five Nights at Freddy‘s, Night Swim, Imaginary, and AfrAId have delivered miss after miss after miss for the production company, so it’s hard to blame anyone who’s abandoned all hope. Now, imagine being in such a position and then stumbling upon this promo for Blumhouse’s Wolf Man film:

Look, cynicism is tired, it really is. But if you’re a production company known for your horror flicks and are finding yourself on a hot streak of stinkers, you should have some foresight on how people might react when the titular Wolf Man would better belong in a film called Man Who’s Having a Pretty Rough Go of Things Right Now.

Indeed, if this costume ends up being true to form in the final cut of the film, then who’s to say this won’t feel like a Wolf Man film in name alone?

It makes much more sense why Ryan Gosling‘s pitch to remake and star in a Wolf Man movie never manifested with him in the lead role. If this is Blumhouse’s idea for a Wolf Man, then Gosling’s handsome mug would offset this creative vision by several orders of magnitude.

With the ittedly justified reactions out of the way, let’s play a bit of devil’s advocate. The above tweet raises an interesting point: why show off the monster design this early? Would that reveal not best be kept for the film itself?

Exactly, so it’s entirely possible that the figure we’re seeing here isn’t the complete transformation, or perhaps this is just one of the phases of the Wolf Man’s transformation, with different forms serving a different narrative purpose. A Wolf Man film, after all, needs to be interested in humanity’s relationship to their mammalian impulses, and having multiple forms would go a long way in examining that idea.

“Needs,” of course, implies that this Wolf Man film has any intention of trying to be good. And like we’ve been saying, Blumhouse’s slate for the last year or so suggests that making a good movie is one of the more negotiable aspects of getting Blumhouse on board for production.

But here’s the thing: Wolf Man is being spearheaded by Leigh Whannell, whose last two writer-director efforts included Upgrade and The Invisible Man; both of which were excellent. The presence of three other screenwriters on the project isn’t ideal, but a tried-and-true creative like Whannell at the helm means the Wolf Man could very well surprise us.

At the very least, we can expect an entirely competent, honest effort at making a Wolf Man movie, and we’ll see how well the whole thing meets our expectations when it hits theaters on Jan. 17, 2025.