It doesn't deliver a Lawrence Talbot or Waldemar Daninsky and surely not their 3D counterpart, Colin Glasgow (remember the 1979, drive-in revision?). However, (The) Wolf Man 2025 still adheres to a lineal, lycanthrope motif, as forged by director Leigh (Saw/The Invisible Man 2020) Wannell, who cowrote with his spouse, Corbett (Insidious) Tuck.
This Universal/Blumhouse chiller presents a neo-generational unfortunate, who's bitten by the breed of monster he's destined to become, but in this case, he and his family end up confined to an inherited, Oregon farmhouse, where the gent licks his wounds as his inner, festering beast seeps through. This puts mother and daughter in a Cujo-like corner, fearing that their maddened loved one (their presumed protector) will soon tear them limb from limb. In other words, it's a warped, family drama, where the father doesn't wish to become the abusive man his father was, and in fighting this dreaded draw, becomes something way worse. Sam Jaeger and Zac Chandler establish the father/son clash in a nervous prologue.
Christopher (Kraven the Hunter) Abbott plays Blake, the son, thirty years after the fact, with Julia (Ozark) Garner as his wife, Charlotte, and Matilia (Starve Acre) Firth as his daughter, Ginger (a nod to Ginger Snaps, perhaps?). They're uncertain, flawed people, but despite their drawbacks, pure in heart, which makes their plight all the more frightful, for we don't want them endangered, and yet if such weren't delivered, well, this wouldn't be a horror movie, let alone one that lives up to its baleful title.
The setting is more sequestered than most werewolf tales, on a par with Amicus/Paul Annett's mystery yarn, The Beast Must Die/Black Werewolf and Charlie Steeds' inn-relegated A Werewolf in England. As such, its intensity presses more toward Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead, Never Let Go and The Shining. It's then a matter of how fast the mayhem will strike at its feverish hub (often mounted through psychedelic vantages), and of course, how soon we'll see Blake's full metamorphosis.
In advance of the picture's release, the werewolf design (as adorned by its shared monsters) triggered controversy since it didn't match the iconic look of Jack Pierce and Lon Chaney Jr. (or for that matter, Rick Baker and Benicio del Toro's 2010 homage), let alone the subsequent, bone-stretching likes of The Howling, An American Werewolf in London and Silver Bullet. We're given instead a practical-effects, "hillbilly" variant of Josh Harnett's subtle Ethan (Lawrence Talbot) Chandler of Penny Dreadful; Henry Hull's Hyde-ish Dr. Wilfred Glendon of The Werewolf of London; Curt Lowens' broad-brow Director Swift of Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory; and Jack Nicholson's weathered, pack-leader Will Randall of Wolf. That means the look shows more human attributes than not, but there's no denying the evident, beastly trim and lustful hunger, which epitomizes this type of evolved, fairy tale.
The result is superb, survivalist terror, which is well structured by the straightforward plot, strengthened all the further by its three, identifiable leads. In the end, Wolf Man may not be the Larry Talbot update that many wanted, but as a monster movie, it's solid and fierce, making it a sweat-beaded success, at least in my humble book.
