In this week’s Friday Feature, we join Wolf Dad in the toxic forest cabin of his youth. Lycanthrophiles who don’t mind being tense as a werewolf at dusk when dusk lasts 103 minutes will find themselves howling for the latest appearance of Wolf Man. Published January 31, 2025.

Wolf Man (2025)

We can appreciate a film that sets its gameboard early, then lets things play out. Wolf Man uses a cold-open flashback to pre-program its outcome and establish its off-grid setting and locations, then zips ahead 30 years to drag us through a telegraphed sequence of events that lead us back to that tense, gendered nightmare. The difference between the two scenarios is the inclusion of a young girl and her mother, who join Wolf Dad in the toxic forest cabin of his youth.

As werewolf cinema, the film has a few things going for it. We’ve seen serial transformations (Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot in the 1941 version), where man becomes wolf each night of the full moon, and returns to human form by day. Larry Fessenden’s excellent Blackout (2023) is a recent serial werewolf story. We’ve also seen gradual transformations, as in Ginger Fitzgerald’s slow, one-way monstering in Ginger Snaps (Katherine Isabelle 2000). Gradual transformation gives us a unique opportunity to split hairs about who is and isn’t human as we approach the point of lycanthropic no return. This most recent Wolf Man commits to that drama and is at its best in the moments where we see Blake Lovell (Christopher Abott) moon behind the wolf face. The film’s signal innovation is to give us a revolving camera perspective that flows through human and monster perspectives, showing their mutual incompatibility and unintelligibility. There’s also a memorable scene in which Wolf Dad follows a thunderous commotion upstairs only to find that he’s tracking the amplified (for him) sound of a spider ascending a closet wall. Meanwhile, during Wolf Dad’s gradual transformation, Blake tries to hang onto the wheel, which results in some unintentionally hilarious half-assed dadding. If the tone of the film was less relentlessly serious and bleak, this could read more effectively as a satire of masculinity (cf. 1981’s An American Werewolf in London), but the potential is lost along with several opportunities to tap into a long tradition of horror comedy exemplified by werewolf cinema. People turning into hairy beasts is terrible, hilarious, and kind of sexy, and when we lose sight of that, we end up with an unfunny Werewolf Dad. And all of that inherent comedy gets perverted in the worst way, so we end up with corniness minus even a hint of horniness. Randy humor turns to sap, and we’re left looking at the same old valley we’ve been told is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever see, while cliche orchestration bumbles behind us. 2.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson