A couple—Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner—and their young daughter leave San Francisco to take possession of a farmhouse deep within central Oregon, hoping to strengthen their family bonds. However, they discover that local rumors about an unusual creature, something like a man with animalistic qualities, are indeed true. “Wolf Man” (2025) represents Universal’s effort to revive their well-known 1941 monster movie, with Leigh Whannell writing and directing after his success with “The Invisible Man.” The film didn't perform well financially. What caused this failure? The initial scenes and the first portion of the story are quite good, but the remainder of the movie becomes a slow-paced thriller set in an isolated location—a situation reminiscent of the farmhouse setting in the classic “Night of the Living Dead.” However, "Night" had a larger group to keep things interesting, while “Wolf Man” focuses on just three people: the husband, wife, and daughter. The sequences depicting werewolf visions are effectively handled, though viewers shouldn’t anticipate an elaborate transformation scene like those found in other movies of this type. I didn't find this disappointing because Whannell seemed to be aiming for a realistic portrayal, similar to Jack Nicholson’s character in “Wolf” from thirty years ago. The transformations into wolf-like men could possibly be interpreted as a commentary on ‘toxic masculinity,’ which is something worth considering (after all, many relationships do suffer due to this dynamic, whether between fathers and sons or husbands and wives). Unfortunately, Julia Garner's performance felt unremarkable; the film would have benefited from someone with the talent of Joelle Westwood, who appeared in the independent movie “The Hunting” four years ago. The runtime is 1 hour, 43 minutes (including 12 minutes of closing credits), and filming took place in New Zealand, with the forest scenes shot near Queenstown on the South Island and the farmhouse scenes filmed at a studio in Wellington on the North Island. GRADE: B-

Source on TMDB