A werewolf can be killed by a silver bullet — or a bad review. For Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, the Upgrade filmmaker’s followup to his 2020 reboot of The Invisible Man, it seems to be the latter. The critic reviews for the Blumhouse-produced remake of 1941’s classic Universal Monsters movie The Wolf Man are calling the creature feature (in theaters Jan. 17) everything from a “toothless reboot” to “half a movie” like the titular half-wolf, half-man himself (played by Christopher Abbott).
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The Poor Things and Kraven the Hunter actor stars as Blake, a husband and father who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his survivalist dad, Grady (Sam Jaeger, vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth).
But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without. As Blake remarks at one point, “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you become so scared of your kids getting scarred that you become the thing that scars them.”
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Wolf Man is Whannell’s fourth film for Blumhouse as writer-director following 2015’s Insidious: Chapter 3, 2018’s Upgrade, and 2020’s The Invisible Man. The latter is his best-reviewed film with 91 percent approval from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, followed by Upgrade (certified fresh at 88 percent). Insidious 3 is rotten at 56 percent, just below Wolf Man‘s 58 percent from over 100 reviews counted. On Metacritic, the film has a 49 percent, indicating “mixed or average” reviews from critics.
“2025’s Wolf Man follows in the footsteps of its predecessors by seeing Blake become said Wolf Man, thanks to receiving a debilitating scratch on his arm,” reads an excerpt from Evan Valentine’s 2-star (out of 5) review for ComicBook. “There are glimpses of brilliance in Blake’s transformation here and there, whether it be from how his new sense of hearing emerges or how the transformation itself makes it feel as though Blake is literally being dragged into a different world from those around him. These ideas fall to the wayside in a by-the-numbers affair that simply never makes good on what could have been.”
According to critics’ reviews, which we’ve rounded up below, the new Wolf Man is a howler.
The Los Angeles Times: “Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style … This is a weaker attempt to crossbreed the classic Universal monsters with contemporary anxieties: a post-pandemic lockdown lament about the impossibility of protecting children from fear.”
TheWrap: On the surface Whannell’s Wolf Man is a somewhat generic monster movie. It’s about innocent people who get attacked by a killer creature in a house in the middle of the woods. No molds have been broken plot-wise. The ingenuity Whannell brought to his instant classic remake of The Invisible Man, which reimagined the premise as a metaphor for an abusive relationship and invented all kinds of terrifying new visual gags, isn’t on the menu today. Wolf Man is about going back to basics, for better and worse … It’s not an instant classic like The Invisible Man. I think we can all live with that. It’s still a scary and interesting movie about a wolf man, anchored by a haunting performance from Abbott, who understood the assignment and went for extra credit. Leigh Whannell knows what makes werewolves tick, if not necessarily what makes them awesome to look at, and Wolf Man is (mostly) better for it.
The Associated Press: “This film is a terrible misfire using a classic movie monster poorly rebooted by the modern home of horror. Slack when it should be terrifying, Wolf Man suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “If you found Joe Johnston’s failed 2010 vehicle for Benicio del Toro, The Wolfman, bogged down by Gothic melodrama, fussy folklore and CGI excess, then the comparatively bare-bones storytelling of Universal’s latest return to the monster movie hall of fame, Wolf Man, might be more to your taste. This isn’t a reimagining on the level of Leigh Whannell’s previous foray into the classic horror vaults, The Invisible Man. But there’s no shortage of intensity or gore, not to mention brisk efficiency in the way the script isolates a fragile family unit before plunging them into lycanthropic mayhem.”
IndieWire: “This deeply un-fun creature feature somehow manages to be every bit as dysfunctional as its studio’s other recent attempts to make lycanthropy great again. Worse, it’s dysfunctional in so many of the same ways: Murky, witless, and plagued by laughable special effects (the prosthetics are crafted with obvious skill, but the hyper-realism of their design can’t help but curdle into comedy after the film abandons its emotional core). That’s a dagger to the heart of a reboot so eager to do something different with its material; so eager to replicate how successfully Whannell re-imagined The Invisible Man for the 21st century by marrying timeless fears to modern sensitivities. Working from a script he co-wrote with his wife Corbett Tuck, the director asks the defining question of its sub-genre with a radical new emphasis (one less focused on the animal inside of us than the humanity that keeps it at bay), only to arrive at an all too familiar answer. What if a man were also a wolf? It would look very dumb.”
Empire Magazine: “Abbott commits entirely to all stages of the role, conveying a loving father with darkness lurking within – even before he turns wolfy … It doesn’t quite marry up underlying themes with its hairy horror surface, but Wolf Man delivers strong performances, skin-crawling bodily changes and excellently scary sequences.”
Vulture: “Wolf Man is a blunt movie, but it also feels like only half a movie … gnarly thrills are offset by impoverished characterizations. All that stuff in the film’s early scenes about Blake’s relationship with his dad, his daughter, and his wife wind up feeling like window dressing. The film, we sense, is trying to say something about how the sins of fathers get passed down to sons, but it eventually abandons the idea — almost as if it started off as a more ambitious project before genre demands derailed it. Abbott can be a wonderfully subtle actor, but Blake’s transformation doesn’t have any emotional weight, and the movie clearly wants it to, given how much time it spends with him. The Wolf Man is one of our lesser-served classic monsters, but he’s also one of the most charismatic when done right. At their best, werewolf pictures can be cathartic, romantic, tragic — a vision of our desires colluding with unchecked animal impulses. This Wolf Man, however, feels like a vague anecdote, devoid of human specificity.”
