Wolf Man (2025) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
written by Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In his 2020 book Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, author Craig Ian Mann charts the evolution of werewolf mythology from the Middle Ages on to show how the metaphorical purpose of werewolves shifted with each new epoch. In medieval times, they were sinners wearing their transgressions on the outside; during the Inquisition, they were presented as witches in disguise. Enlightenment dismisses the werewolf as religious hokum, but it comes roaring back in the Romantic period as a psychological concept indicating our tempestuous natures, and cinema is born soon enough afterwards to freeze this take in amber. In movies, werewolves are typically a Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit in which the bestial side of some hapless schmo is temporarily unleashed. The particulars change, of course. Sometimes, a bite portends a transformation, one usually governed by the lunar cycle. Sometimes, the werewolf infection is an inherited curse. Sometimes, as in Sam Katzman’s ten-cent wonder The Werewolf, it’s a matter of science gone awry. The zeitgeist, too, can alter our perception of the werewolf, and periodically renew its currency. 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, for instance, reflected the moral panic over juvenile delinquents, as Mann notes, while 1985’s Teen Wolf was, in its incoherent way, another of the decade’s cautionary tales about getting high on your own supply.

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a movie of the moment when it opened in February 2020. Whannell took an unexpectedly revisionist approach to a lesser but evergreen Universal monster: Perhaps recognizing that Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man left a straight-up reboot with nowhere to go, he shunted the title character to the background and centred the story around a woman named Cecilia, who, having escaped a toxic relationship with a tech bro, correctly intuits that her ex is using his cutting-edge invisibility suit to stalk her undetected while everyone around her thinks she’s being paranoid. This adjustment in POV made for a film that was not only topical, allegorizing a core tenet of the #MeToo/Time’s Up movements (“Believe women”), but also eerily prescient. The Invisible Man opened on February 28, 2020, just 13 days before the first Covid lockdown, and suddenly, Cecilia’s predicament of anxious isolation was the new status quo. Invisibility outgrew its emblematic function–that is, as the psychic cloud abusers cast over the abused–to resonate with global circumstances, becoming a symbol of ghostly, airborne death.

I looked forward to seeing how Whannell would deconstruct the Wolf Man, a creation higher up on the Mount Rushmore of Universal monsters and arguably more atrophied as a result. When he resurfaced on his 70^th anniversary in Joe Johnston’s gnarly The Wolfman, he was still shackled to the Victorian trappings and gypsy lore of the original film, and Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup took its cues from the Jack Pierce mask of fur that Lon Chaney Jr. wore to perfection. Whannell immediately shakes the character like an Etch-a-Sketch, discarding even his legacy name, Larry Talbot. His Wolf Man would never meet Frankenstein or Abbott and Costello–existentially, they’re not in the same zip code. Any capitulations to the past in the picture’s sense of inexorable doom or its father-son Sturm und Drang are so indirect that it’s a stretch to call them homage. Yet if Whannell’s Wolf Man is a work of iconoclasm, it’s an oddly gentle one. These departures are not correctives: they’re not terribly irreverent, nor are they an appeal to cynicism. Whannell hasn’t, in other words, Poochied the Wolf Man, though he may have pushed the werewolf into uncharted territory for film. For better or worse.

***

Somewhere in central Oregon, hardcore survivalist Grady Lovell (Sam Jaegar) takes his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) a-hunting. Introductory titles cast a pall, telling of a missing hiker who has been spotted in the area and is believed to have contracted Hills Fever, a regional virus the indigenous locals once referred to as “Face of the Wolf.” Blake, searching for a deer in his sight, catches a glimpse of what we presume is the transformed hiker. Grady orders Blake into the deer blind, where Grady crouches with rifle drawn as the chittering, snarling Something gets so close they can see its breath. Thirty years later, Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a father himself, a stay-at-home dad raising a daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), with journalist wife Charlotte (the ubiquitous Julia Garner). When he receives word that his father was “finally” declared deceased, Blake has an epiphany: the three of them should spend the summer together in Oregon while he packs up his father’s belongings. “I just want us to enjoy each other,” he says, “and try to be happy as a family while we are here.”

This set-up is dense with text. We learn that Grady, in addition to being only presumed dead, always intimidated Blake, prompting Blake to leave home as soon as he could. Blake is comparatively affectionate with Ginger, although it’s impossible not to hear an echo of his old man shouting, “You’re off in your own goddamn world somewhere!” when he scolds Ginger for not getting down from a traffic barrier like he asked. (“I’m sorry I lost my temper. That’s not me,” he says.) For her part, Charlotte is afraid she’s worked so hard to establish a career that she’s forgotten how to relate to her child; on some level, Wolf Man is a distaff inversion of the ‘workaholic dad reprioritizes through cosmic intervention’ formula, albeit a resolutely unfunny one, unlike the progenitors of this subgenre (e.g., Hook, Liar Liar, every third Adam Sandler movie).

The rest of Wolf Man is dense with subtext–and, as it happens, extratext. Blake schleps his family to the boonies of Oregon but has trouble locating the old homestead. A young man named Derek (Benedict Hardie) spots them from the deer blind, and he and Blake gradually recognize each other from childhood. Their conversation quickly takes on a passive-aggressive edge: When Derek tells him, “You’ve been gone a long time, Blake,” it sounds not like “Welcome home,” but like “You’re an interloper now.” Derek offers to hop in the front seat and navigate, and Blake takes him up on it over Charlotte’s objection to his hunting rifle. (“Charlotte, everyone around here has a gun,” Blake ‘reassures’ her.) While Derek could be trying to cuck him a bit, I don’t see Blake as a glutton for it–he’s just tired of feeling cowed by his birthplace. But the story of that place and Blake’s relationship to it is at best told obliquely, through the way these woods come to reject the entire premise of Blake. You can’t go home again.

Whannell veteran Hendrie, for what it’s worth, makes a big impression in his brief amount of screentime, finding a curious pathos in Derek’s quiet menace. Derek, you see, is ejected from the vehicle and dragged away to be sacrificed when Blake swerves to avoid a Wolf Man in the middle of the road–a sphincter-tightening sequence that appears to be salvaging a lonesome highlight of Wes Craven’s misbegotten foray into the werewolf genre, Cursed. (There are certainly other references to werewolf movies here, including the “Pierce” branding of Blake’s U-Haul.) Charlotte and Ginger emerge from the wreck miraculously unscathed, but Blake receives a telltale scratch on his arm, potentially from his own Hills Fever-ish father. Note the teddy bear ears sewn into the hoodie Ginger wears to Oregon: animalism as family trait.

Blake and family flee to his childhood farmhouse. He battens down the hatches, so to speak, gets the generator working, and fires up the ham radio. “We’re safe,” Blake says, but of course the beast is already inside. Blake loses a tooth eating jerky and thinks his jaw must have hit the steering wheel. His hand aches from hammering a couple of nails. He hears what turns out to be a spider climbing up the wall–upstairs. Renowned for their then-cutting-edge prosthetic effects, the werewolf transformations in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, both from 1981, are depicted with such verisimilitude as to be practically pornographic. They were an antidote to the almost serene metamorphoses Lon Chaney Jr. went through, and as freakish spectacles of suffering they could scarcely be topped. Not foolish enough to try, Whannell approaches Blake’s transformation subjectively. That spider works the subwoofer like a T-Rex. Blake develops aphasia, and the camera sometimes merges with his perspective as everything takes on the bioluminescence of a black-light poster and everyone speaks in tongues.*

One might lump these stylistic flourishes in with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly‘s “locked-in” POV shots or Sound of Metal‘s “deaf” soundscapes as part of a new hyper-empathy that attempts to translate the disability experience cinematically. Blake is not, strictly speaking, disabled (or rather, only strictly speaking is he disabled), but his predicament is meant to evoke neurodegenerative disorders, which Whannell had drawn a direct line to in a deleted flashback to Blake’s ALS-afflicted mother. This is what I mean by Blake disrupting the legacy of screen werewolves: There’s nothing profound, exactly, about Blake becoming a savage beast, since his lycanthropy is framed as a terminal illness. Transformation isn’t liberation in Wolf Man, it’s a prison sentence. Living death. Whannell ultimately steers the picture into the same tragic cul-de-sac as fellow Aussie filmmaker Philippe Mora’s The Beast Within, whose lupine title creature sails through so many disparate horror tropes–and is saddled with so much semiotic baggage–as to resist a formal classification.

Just as Blake can’t resist the pull of dark territory, Whannell has followed his muse into some decidedly uncommercial places. It’s bracing and you want to champion it, especially since IP-driven filmmaking is all about eliminating risk for the studio, i.e., the element of surprise. Wolf Man is rarely conventionally satisfying as either a tentpole or a werewolf movie, and more power to it; but its vision is a tad blinkered. This time around, Whannell and wife Corbett Tuck, his co-writer, intentionally filtered the material through the prism of Covid, a current event when they began work on the screenplay and an ongoing ordeal for the human race that we cannot let the bastards memory-hole. Alas, pandemic vibes have been infecting cinema for long enough now that it does leave Wolf Man feeling lapped. Not to mention, there is something that rings hollow, even allegorically, about compressing the arc of Covid into a single night. A bigger issue, though, is that this microcosm of the pandemic sees the movie abandoning its raison d’être: Blake becomes zombie-coded in the Night of the Living Dead of it all, and the movie just doesn’t have the load-bearing walls for that kind of intellectual perversity. I’m not convinced it’s impossible to modernize the Wolf Man without substituting him for a different type of monster.

***

Whannell is terrified of losing his bodily autonomy. Had he not made this explicit in Walter Chaw’s interview with him earlier this year, I still would have drawn that conclusion from the one-two punch of Wolf Man and his 2018 movie Upgrade, in which a quadriplegic strikes a Faustian bargain to walk again. Consider that in the original Saw, co-written by and starring Whannell, the horror is rooted in the notion of having to sacrifice a limb. (Wolf Man, in fact, finds the protagonist gnawing off his foot to escape a bear trap.) Let me just say, as a disabled person, I get it: the thought of deteriorating further keeps me up at night. But putting your phobia up on the screen–repeatedly–can get unseemly, resembling and inspiring contempt for people like me, and though Whannell credits David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly as a primary influence on the film (along with Kubrick’s The Shining), his approach to body horror is considerably more morose, wanting for the mischievous kink that renders Brundlefly palatable. There’s little room for fascination and curiosity in Wolf Man, even of the morbid kind–and no room for the romantic, Byronic loneliness of the Wolf Man’s plight. Unlike his forebears in this franchise, Blake is eventually well and truly Othered.

There is something else, something that makes me uncomfortable, in particular, with Wolf Man‘s dicey, reductive equation of lycanthropy with real-world disability. Although Blake perishing at the hands of a loved one observes a hallowed tradition (never mind that Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot was hastily resurrected in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man), because he is degenerative-illness incarnate, his demise carries with it the faint whiff of an agenda. Between this and the frankly ableist Night Swim, such is unfortunately par for the Blumhouse course of late. Still, Wolf Man isn’t agitprop. Indeed, it has an inevitability that transcends discourse. It’s a dirge. The picture is dedicated to Chandler Tuck, Whannell’s brother-in-law, who took his own life two weeks before shooting commenced. As Whannell told Walter, “[Wolf Man is] infused with the loss of him. Every frame of it. Every pore of that movie is sick with grief.” I’m struck by Garner’s decision to map her character’s emotional journey using the now-common Seven Stages of Grief, suggesting that Charlotte is something of a Cassandra. When she confides her qualms about spending quality time with Ginger to Blake, it’s nothing less than a prophecy of single-parenthood. She’s a widow from the get-go, and she knows it.

To be perfectly frank, Wolf Man triggered, nay, dredged up unpleasant memories of my father’s last week on Earth in the dead of winter as he decayed from cancer in my brother’s old bedroom. I questioned the idea of turning Wolf Man into an intimate chamber piece: If you’re Ginger, this is a film of unrelenting cruelty–Cujo, but worse, because the dog is Dad. And as much as I want to be the contrarian about the poorly received creature design, it replaces the iconic Larry Talbot makeup with an emaciated, orc-faced George “the Animal” Steele that inspires a befuddlement bordering on revulsion. (Nevertheless, Abbott’s limited time in the suit is affecting.) Given its ancestry, the picture is grim to a fault. At Letterboxd, my friend Adam Palmer wrote that he wished movies this dimly lit were tested on crappy TVs the way music is tested on car stereos, which struck me as an accidentally perfect critique of a navel-gazing work nigh inaccessible to mainstream audiences. Whannell’s film is also an honest Wolf Man for these rotten times, however, and there is a ray of hope in the closing tableaux as Charlotte and Ginger survey a view of Oregon that finally delivers on the beauty Blake promised at the outset. They’ve inherited a kingdom. Many would have us believing otherwise, but Wolf Man is here to remind you: the future is female.

THE 4K UHD DISC
Universal brings Wolf Man to 4K UHD disc in a Collector’s Edition featuring a top-drawer 2.39:1, 2160p presentation encoded for HDR10 playback. While lending the usual flair to headlamps and the like, HDR brings out a luminous, almost gossamer quality in Stefan Duscio’s cinematography that stands apart from the 1080p alternative on the accompanying Blu-ray. (You also feel not just the extra nits but heat when the light gains intensity during Blake’s werewolf POV.) And the dropoff to black is comparatively gradual, increasing shadow detail at least as much as the doubled resolution. The palette is pretty similar across the two formats, but foliage and colourful clothing choices reap dynamism from the wider colour gamut. Wolf Man is a dark film no matter how you choose to watch it–so be prepared–but somehow it’s a handsomer one in UHD.

The attendant Dolby Atmos track painlessly converts to 7.1 TrueHD on antiquated systems like mine. Reproduced with impressive transparency, piercing clarity, and a forceful low-end, this is a nerve-jangling and expressionistic mix that traps you with Blake’s family–and, occasionally, inside his head. The rolling thunder over the prologue uncannily replicates the faraway/so close threat of a brewing storm, and the gunshots devastate. Horror does object-based mixing better than virtually any other genre these days. On another track is a talkative film-length yakker from Whannell, who reveals that the opening shot of ants attacking a wasp was not only real but planned. That being said, he immediately proceeds to mount a passionate defense of CGI by pointing out various digital embellishments that brought the Wellington, New Zealand locations closer to Oregon. Whannell is in good spirits and sometimes suspiciously jokey–like when, after Blake is shot, he cracks wise about being forced to use blanks and points out that while “Chris” [Abbott] wasn’t having the best day of his life lying half-naked on the cold ground for hours, “I was really warm and I had those little hand-warmer things in my big puffer jacket.” I wondered if it was a defense mechanism. Listen through the end credits for an “Easter egg” that seems poised to wring a chuckle out of Aussies, Kiwis, and Whannell intimates.

Four making-of docs append the feature in 4K SDR. “Unleashing a New Monster” (8 mins.) is a promotionally slanted overview of the production, with cast and crew singing the project’s and each other’s praises. Garner “just has an allergy to inauthenticity,” touts Whannell, while Garner herself offers that having a “grounded” actor like Abbott made her job easier. “It gets really sad when Blake changes into the monster,” says Firth, breaking my heart off-camera as effortlessly as she does in character. We learn, as Whannell mentions in his commentary, that they built an American-style house and barn in the middle of Wellington–to code, no less, so that the structures wouldn’t blow over in the wind. In “Designing Wolf Man” (9 mins.), Abbott and Whannell celebrate the film’s increasingly rare use of prosthetics, the former for their “tactileness,” the latter for keeping Wolf Man in the tradition of the creature features he grew up with. Special makeup effects designer Arjen Tuiten registered the gravitas of the coveted assignment, and I must say that in sculpture form, his concept is quite striking. For what it’s worth, the craftsmanship of these artists, whom we see toiling away on disgustingly realistic flesh wounds and such, is never in doubt.

A spotlight on the stunts, “Hands on Horror” (7 mins.), further evangelizes about the virtues of going practical in a digital world. I love the reveal that the filth on a windshield is actually cinnamon. Movie magic! Lastly, “Nightmares and Soundscapes” (7 mins.) explores the various techniques that went into realizing the Wolf Vision(™?) sequences. Production sound mixer Chris Hiles geeks out over the ambisonic microphone, which he placed on a turntable to capture voices in a circular motion heard as travelling audio in the cinema. Whannell welcomed the sound designers’ presence on set, and they, in turn, did things like plant speakers in the woods to generate scary noises the actors could react to believably. I wish this featurette were long enough to delve into Wolf Man‘s complex foley work beyond the few nuggets of B-roll we get, but alas. All of this supplementary material resurfaces on the Blu-ray in 1080p. The U.S. release contains a digital copy of the film as well.

103 minutes; R; UHD: 2.39:1 (2160p/MPEG-H), HDR10; BD: 2.39:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), French DD 5.1, Spanish DD+ 7.1, BD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English DVS 2.0, French DD+ 7.1, Spanish DD+ 7.1; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Universal

*I admit these scenes brought me closer to understanding my cat.