The werewolf story has never got old since one of its appearances on screen in a 1941 classic also called Wolf Man. This film is an official reboot, though very little is common between them except long sequences of a man changing into the beast. Circa 2025 Wolf Man starts out appropriately as a take on toxic masculinity and the long scars it leaves, with glimpses of the shadow it casts on the relationship of Blake and his wife Charlotte (a detached married couple, played wonderfully by the two restrained actors Abbott and Garner, respectively). Blake is at all times conscious of not letting the anger and control that were the hallmark of his father’s relationship with him show up in his ties with Charlotte or their daughter Ginger (Firth). A writer between jobs, a career description that is as far as it gets from his hunter father, Blake is happy cooking and sporting lipstick for the daughter he adores. Once they are back at Blake’s childhood home in Oregon’s forests though, the past starts catching up — in ways more than Blake had bargained for. And once scars of the kind left by actual talons and fangs start showing up, Whennell (the director and co-writer with an impressive horror oeuvre) dumps any further exploration of wounds that go deeper. Wolf Man movie trailer: Even the idea of how you separate the man you love from the beast you must hate is a superficial scratch. Instead, the film claws itself into darker and darker corners, and as Charlotte and Ginger run around helter-skelter from one such corner to another, goriness mounts and scares dwindle. Tellingly, it is the wisp of breath over a flimsy gate, on the other side of which lies a thing that you do not want to see, is the most terrifying detail. Wolf Man movie director: Leigh Whannell Wolf Man movie cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth Wolf Man movie rating: 2 stars
