It is unfortunate one can count the number of genuinely great werewolf films on your fingers and still have remaining digits. This film does not add to that number. Of late werewolves seem relegated to domestic violence metaphors with a healthy dose of generational trauma, which does make me pine for when they were being used as puberty analogies. This film makes the attempt to ‘ground’ lycanthropy as a disease, centering the film around the slow, grotesque unraveling of body and mind. The practical effects are suitably gross, even if the final design is questionable, as werewolves always come off better with far less alopecia. The film is never actively bad, but never quite good either, with the exception of several scenes of ‘werewolf vision’ which are inspired. But the script is a bigger problem: it meanders through plot and character development, with a number of subplots that never really pay off. The performances are above average, Julia Garner delivers but she’s saddled with some thankless character work. The metaphors grow tedious and long in the tooth, repeated ad nauseam in case you weren’t paying attention from the first second. Overall, this is a rare miss for director Wanell, and another disappointing addition to the library of weak werewolf films.
Wolf Man (2025)