No other studio can claim to be the one and only home of cinema’s greatest monsters as Universal Studios has become.  Going back to their early years, it can be said that Movie Monsters made Universal what it is today.  Whether it’s Frankenstein’s Monster, Count Dracula, the Invisible Man or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, these monsters are an institution that Universal proudly claims as their own.  But, apart from the Creature from the Black Lagoon which is an original cinematic creation, none of the other movie monsters belong solely to Universal, mostly originating from literary sources well before cinema existed.  So, to keep their profile up as the kings of monster movies, Universal has had to find new ways to refresh their stable of monster characters for new generations.  One of the most ill-fated attempts to bring Universal Monsters back to the big screen was the bungled attempt at creating a Marvel style Cinematic Universe that tied all the monsters together called Dark Universe.  Universal had high hopes that they could sustain a blockbuster cinematic universe based around their monsters, and they were getting many big names on board to participate, including casting Javier Bardem for their Wolf Man and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man.  Unfortunately, the Dark Universe flamed out fast due to the failure of The Mummy (2017), which even the star power of Tom Cruise couldn’t save.  The Wolf Man and Invisible Man films were quickly scrapped before they even started cameras rolling, and the Dark Universe was effectively deader than Dracula in less than a year.  With the future of the Universal Monsters in limbo, the studio needed to find a new path forward to help revitalize these characters again.  And they found their savior in a surprising collaborator that would turn out to be the ideal shepherds in giving new life for these monsters; a production company called Blumhouse.

Blumhouse, the company founded by producer Jason Blum, revolutionized the horror movie genre by putting an emphasis on economically made horror films that were more auteur driven.  Because their films were more experimental and cost a fraction of what other horror films were made with, Blumhouse managed to consistently turn a profit and this got the attention of Hollywood who saw their blueprint for success as a perfect way to revitalize a horror genre that had become bloated and stagnant.  Universal, who wanted to save face from the failure of the Dark Universe and bring new life to their monster properties, were eager to partner with Blumhouse, and so an exclusive pact was made by the two entities.  Blumhouse would now have the backing of a major studio, while Universal would have proven horror powerhouse managing their characters in a way that would peak audience interest again.  One of the key new horror filmmakers to emerge within the Blumhouse family was Australian actor turned director Leigh Whannell.  Whannell developed his horror resume as the writer for some of James Wan’s most notable films in the genre, namely Saw (2004) and Insidious (2010).  Starting with Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) he has been directing and writing horror films, and was given the opportunity by Blumhouse to launch their new partnership with Universal in re-imagining their stable of classic monsters.  His first feature under this experiment was a modern re-telling of The Invisible Man (2020).  Though the film had it’s box office run cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic, it still managed to land well with both critics and audiences.  People praised it’s fresh take on the classic movie monster, with it’s POV shifted to the vicitim of the Invisible Man (an unforgettable Elisabeth Moss) whose story became an effective allegory about domestic violence committed on women.  For his follow-up, Whannell is now getting the chance to take on another classic Universal Monster with his re-imagining of the Wolf Man (2025).  The only question is, can it live up to the bold new take that we saw in The Invisible Man, or does it fall short and makes the Blumhouse experiment unfortunately short-lived.

The film opens 30 years in the past, where a young boy named Blake (Zac Chandler) is taken out hunting with his father Grady (Sam Jaeger).  Grady is tough on his son, wanting him to take the idea of hunting and survival in the wild seriously.  While deep in the woods in a secluded valley in the Oregon mountains, the encounter a mysterious creature that is unlike anything else they’ve seen before; something like a wolf, but one that can stand up straight like a human.  The close encounter spooks Grady and Blake, and they quickly retreat from the forest.  Locals consider Grady crazy, but he’s determined to get proof of what he saw.  Cut forward to the present day, grown up Blake (Christopher Abbott) is now a father himself, to a young girl named Ginger (Matilda Firth).  Both Blake and Ginger have a strong bond with each other, with Blake demonstrating a more compassionate hand at parenting than his father.  Ginger’s mom, Charlotte (Julia Garner) on the other hand is too pre-occupied with work to be invested in her daughters life, and it causes some friction between them as well as with Blake.  One day, Blake receives the news that his father, who has been missing for quite some time, has now been legally declared dead by authorities in the State of Oregon, and that Blake has now inherited the farm house that they used to live in 30 years ago.  Blake convinces his wife and daughter that they should get away from the city and stay at the farm for a couple of weeks in order to reconnect as a family.  On their way there, Blake swerves off the road after seeing a scary looking creature in the middle of the road.  After their camper crashes, Blake tries to escape the vehicle, but ends up getting his arm slashed by the same beast that caused him to crash in the first place.  They safely make it to the farm house, but while inside, Blake begins to feel very sick.  Over time, his illness worsens, upsetting his family.  More and more his body becomes more twisted and beast like, and he can no longer communicate with his family.  As the night goes further on, Charlotte and Ginger have to come to terms that their protector himself may in fact attack them as he slowly turns into a Wolf Man.

One thing that the movie has to contend with is the familiarity of the Wolf Man in cinema.  Lon Chaney Jr. famously brought the character to life originally on the big screen in 1941’s The Wolf Man.  Universal would once again revisit the character with the 2010 film starring Benicio Del Toro.  Both films are notable for setting the story within a Victorian setting, which Leigh Whannell departs from in his mostly original, modern adaptation of the classic story.  Here he leaves foggy, cold England for foggy, cold Oregon, which ultimately still works thematically for this story.  In general, Leigh makes quite a few changes to the overall character that I would say mostly benefits the story as a whole.  The thing that I like the most about the movie is the way it handles the transformation of the Blake into a Wolf Man.  It still follows the mythology that we all know, where the wolf’s curse is like a contagion; once you’ve been attacked by a Wolf Man and survive, you become one yourself.  The thing that this movie does different is that it’s not an instantaneous change.  Blake gradually turns into the Wolf Man, with the movie really selling us on the fact that it is a painful process.  The middle section of this movie, where most of the transformation is happening, is the strongest part, where you slowly see Blake’s humanity slipping away with every new wolf trait he develops.  It starts with a stronger sense of smell, then acute hearing, and then ultimately seeing the world through a broader color spectrum in a stunning visual.  The movie treats the tragedy of this Wolf Man curse more seriously than most other versions of this story we’ve seen, and it’s also fairly bleak about it too.  There’s no salvation for Blake; no reversal after the light of a full moon is gone.  Once he’s been bled by the creature, he’s already doomed.

The problem that keeps the movie from being a bigger success is that after the transformation happens, the movie gets a bit repetitive.  With the focus shifted to the characters of Charlotte and Ginger, they unfortunately spend the whole rest of the movie on the run from both Blake and the other Wolf Man haunting the woods around the farm.  There’s no more development to their characters other than that.  The movie could have played more into the mother and the daughter mending their strained relationship through the shared ordeal, but the movie doesn’t make a lot of time for that.  Instead, it sort of pads the run time, with the characters making decisions to run and hide in different ways.  The go outside for a bit, than run back into the farm house, then back outside again, and then back into the house.  The repetition of the third act really begins to undermine the stronger parts of the story found in the film’s first half.  None of it is bad per say, it makes you wish that the film had just a little bit more to say other than having it’s two main heroines constantly be put into harms’ way.  It’s a downgrade from what Whannell was able to do with The Invisible Man, which really did a great job of building the tension of the movie into something fresh and unexpected.  It was a movie that took the familiar movie monster and took the story in a different direction than what you’d expect, which really enhanced the tension and the fear factor as well.  There’s beginnings of some good ideas in the early part of this movie, and some of them lead to a great re-imagining of the wolf man’s transformation, but when the movie decides it wants to go into an action movie climax, that’s where it definitely falls short.

One the things that definitely holds the movie together are the performances.  Christopher Abbott in particular really shines in what is very much a demanding role.  A lot of the success of the transformation scenes has to come from the effectiveness of the performance of the actor.  Abbott does a great job of portraying a man going through a terrifying and painful transformation.  The best part of this is that he never goes over the top with any of it.  When he is dealing with the most painful parts of his transformation, he characterizes it like a man drowning in a deep fever, balled up and trembling.  And once he goes into the final steps of his transformation, he believably portrays the physicality of a wild creature.  There’s a chilling moment early on before he makes his full transformation, where he begins gnawing at his open wound on his arm, like how a real wolf would tackle a piece of meat.  It’s a moment in the performance where an actor could get the physicality wrong, and it shows that Christopher Abbott must have studied up on how to act like a wolf in that scene.  The make-up effects are pretty convincing too, which follows in the proud tradition of the Wolf Man being a ground-breaking character in the art of prosthetic make-up, going all the way back to when Cheney played him.  Abbott completely disappears once the creature takes his final form, and it’s a testament to the make-up artists and Abbott’s committed physical acting that helps to make the transformation feel believably realistic.  Julia Garner’s character may be a tad underwritten, but she still does a fine job acting in this role.  I like the fact that she refrains from going over the top in her more frightened scenes.  The way she plays it, as someone who tries to remain in control even as she is paralyzed with fear, is just the right angle to take with the character.  Matilda Firth also works well enough as Ginger, helping her feel natural as the child in this scenario.  She’s sweet, but not saccharine or creepy, which is the binary dynamic that most children in horror movies tend to fall on either side of.  The movie overall has a very limited cast to work with, and thankfully the three main players here all have strong on screen chemistry with each other.

While Leigh Whannell’s adaptation of the Wolf Man may lack something in it’s storytelling, it makes up for some of that with it’s style.  Whannell does some really creative things with this re-telling of the familiar story, particularly in the visuals and with the sound-editing.  One of the best visual ideas is in showing shifting perspectives between the characters once Blake begins his transformation.  This really helps to sell the horrifying change that is going on with his body.  He begins to have the eyesight of a wolf, which allows him to see things through an infrared spectrum.  He’s better able to see things in the dark, and all the colors are take on a weird psychedelic look too.  There’s a really effective scene where it shifts from his family’s perspective, where Charlotte and Ginger are hiding within pitch black darkness inside of a barn and the camera moves away from them and shifts midway through the shot into the night vision of Blake’s POV before shifting back to the darkness again, all in a oner shot.  The way that they use sound in the movie is also incredible.  The films does an effective job of creating the cacophony of exaggerated sound that Blake now hears after his transformation, and how he no longer can hear his family speak to him clearly anymore.  There’s also a grotesque, crunchiness to the sounds his body makes when the bones inside of him change during the transformation.  And once he is in wolf mode, the movie makes his deep breath growling sound all the more otherworldly.  There’s a lot of great craft put to use in this movie, and Whannell succeeds in grounding his Wolf Man story in an almost realistic portrayal.  You really get the visceral feel of the horrific transformation that Blake goes through, and it does builds the fear up of what this creature ultimately becomes, with something that both feels of the natural world but also out of pure fantasy as well.

Overall, Leigh Whannell does a good job of giving the classic character of the Wolf Man a fresh new portrayal on the big screen.  It does seem like he was overly concerned with getting the transformation part right, and the rest was treated more as an afterthought.  When Blake goes through his transformation, it’s where the movie works the best, and it’s a testament to the make-up effects team, the visual and audio effects engineers, and Christopher Abbott all delivering together for making this a more engaging experience overall.  It’s only when Leigh Whannell takes the movie into the repetitive final act that you see the shortcomings of this adaptation, because it ultimately leads nowhere.  The Invisible Man ultimately stood out much better because of the unexpected turns it took with it’s story, which also gave us an interesting twist on the narrative you wouldn’t have seen in any other version.  Ultimately, this Wolf Man does go down the road you expect it to, and that is disappointing, given all the other things it gets right.  The surprising thing is that it’s a very bleak take on the story.  There’s no salvation for Blake; once he’s infected, he’s done for, and the movie is a sad march to death for him as you see his humanity slip away.  Not every horror movie needs to have a message to it, but I would’ve liked to see the film present some idea of what this arc for Blake was all about.  Was it saying something about inherited trauma, and how violence is passed down through generations?  I just wish there was a more clever edge to this story.  In the end, it’s definitely a strong presentation of style, as Whannell does a great job with setting up atmosphere and giving a visceral portrayal of the horrific Wolf Man transformation.  It makes me wonder what other fresh new takes we’ll see of Universal’s Movie Monsters from Blumhouse in the coming years.  This movie, and to a greater extant The Invisible Man, demonstrate that it was a good idea for Universal to make Blumhouse the caretakers of these characters.  Let’s hope that both studios continue to do brave new things with these classic movie monsters so that more generations can continue to appreciate these icons for years to come.  It’s not a perfect horror adaptation, but it can still work as a howling good time with some really terrifying and effective horror elements there to give us a good fright.

Rating: 7/10