Wolf Man comes to us from Leigh Whannell, who made so many brilliant horror movies while James Wan got all the credit. Lucky that’s been changing in recent years, ever since his ingenious reinvention of The Invisible Man finally showed how to make the Universal Monster lineup relevant in the 21st century.

Speaking of which, I find it rather laughable that Universal is trying so hard to revitalize their movie monsters when pretty much all of them (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, werewolves, mummies, etc.) are in the public domain. The only one that isn’t is the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who’s set to hit public domain in 2050. In fact, the original Universal movies from the 1930s will be set to hit public domain in a few short years.

I can only assume that Universal is thinking along the same lines as Disney with their live-action remakes and DC/WB (Superman goes public in 2034, Batman the year after) with their cinematic relaunch: Establish hard and early that even after everybody technically owns the characters, it’s the corporate-owned name brand stuff that everyone associates with the character. But I digress.

So here’s Wolf Man, in which Universal, Blumhouse, and Whannell try to recapture that same “Invisible Man” magic from the pre-COVID days. What’s more, Whannell brought along wife Corbett Tuck to make her feature writing debut. Just one problem: Whannell wasn’t the first choice for this project. Except he was.

See, Whannell and Tuck wrote the script, but Whannell declined to direct the movie due to scheduling conflicts. Thus Derek Cianfrance was brought in, hot off Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, with the intention of directing Ryan Gosling as the titular lycanthrope. Development was coming along smoothly and cameras were set to roll… and then came the AMPAS holdouts that took up half of 2023. Schedules got shifted around, so Cianfrance and Gosling were no longer available. Thus Whannell came back in to save everybody’s asses, gather any actors who were available last-minute, and rush together a production to start shooting in March 2024.

Hm. Why does this sound familiar? Oh, right: Mark Romanek was set to direct The Wolf Man (2010) before he had to get replaced at the last minute with Joe Johnston. And we all know how that movie turned out.

We lay our scene somewhere in the Central Oregon boondocks, but the film was actually shot in New Zealand, so you already know the geography and the Native American lore are all bullshit. We first meet Blake (played as a child by Zac Chandler, and as an adult by Christopher Abbott) as a young boy growing up in this rural forest cabin with his domineering father (Grady, played by Sam Jaeger). The prologue is admittedly useful for thematic developments regarding humanity’s relationship with nature, generational trauma, the thin line between being protective and being a violent psychopath, man versus monster, and so on. Sure, the dialogue is aggressively blunt, but it’s early in the film and the tone is well set.

Cut to thirty years later. Blake is now a stay-at-home dad to his young daughter (Ginger, played by Matilda Firth) while his wife (Charlotte, played by Julia Garner) is busy as a workaholic journalist. Long story short, Blake gets word that his father has finally been declared dead after he went missing under vague circumstances. Eager for some much-needed quality time, Blake takes his family out to his newly-vacated childhood home, he gets attacked by a werewolf on the way there, and Blake starts turning into something inhuman.

From there, we’ve got 1) a family barricading themselves in a remote cabin with no chance of outside help, 2) struggling to survive while a monster is lurking around somewhere outside, 3) the monster could infect any of our characters upon biting or clawing at them, and 4) one of their own is already infected, leaving our remaining characters with the question of when or whether to put him down.

Congratulations, Mr. Whannell — you turned a werewolf movie into a zombie movie.

Yes, the actors are all wonderful and they’re all doing the best they can with what they’ve got. The problem is that they’re all stuck with flat dialogue and archetypes from a zombie flick. The only character who’s remotely interesting is Blake, and that’s only after he starts turning into a werewolf. It makes a huge difference that Blake loses his ability to speak, so we’re left watching the internal struggle and trying to gauge how far gone he really is. All the other characters — including Blake, pre-infection — are neither interesting enough to be sympathetic nor hateful enough to be effective heels. They’re just bland.

Of course this has a knock-on effect with regards to the horror. Yes, the makeup effects are suitably awesome. I genuinely love how Blake’s transformation is more gradual and we get to watch him lose his humanity in layers. I also love the POV scenes when we see how Blake perceives the world around him in a different way as his senses get heightened, that was really cool. The effects are all lifelike and nicely visceral, and of course Whannell is a master at staging cinematic horror.

The big problem here is that there are only three kills in the entire movie. One of them is a character who’s only killed off two minutes after he’s introduced. The second is a kill that got telegraphed an hour in advance. The third is Blake himself, because of course there’s no other way this story can possibly end. Thus we’re left with bland characters, a bland plot, and bland kills.

Wolf Man is definitely a movie that looked better on paper. I love the filmmaker, I love the cast, and I love the notion of refocusing the story onto a woman who has to defend herself from a loved one turned into a monster. It worked for The Invisible Man (2020) and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have worked here… except the picture got rushed into production with a script that needed another couple of drafts and a budget that needed to accommodate another main character or two.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly not a bad movie… by the standards of a boilerplate zombie flick. Given the pedigree and the potential of this movie, it could’ve and should’ve been so much more.