Wolf Man

Welcome back, everyone! It's year 15 of Mr. Pat's 31 Days of Halloween! I made a post about this earlier, but I wanted to reiterate that there won't be any video reviews this year. I have a new, beautiful baby girl, I'm interim EP at my job, where I work from midnight until eight in the morning and I'm now teaching a journalism class at a local college. While all of that is super exciting, I don't have the time to make the video reviews because I'm a staff of one! Anyways, I enjoy kicking off the new year with something new, so let's talk about...

Wolf Man (2025)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is very likely that I liked this movie more than you. I'll get into why later, but first, let's talk about the plot.

We open with a son and a very strict, military father out hunting. To give you an idea of the discipline the dad expects, the first thing we see is the child sleeping in bed, and from off camera, you hear his dad yell, "TEN HUT!" The kid bolts out of bed like he's been struck by lightning and makes his bed perfectly in a matter of seconds. You understand everything about their relationship in the first few seconds you meet the child. While they're out, we get gorgeous shots of the Oregon landscape, and even the seemingly joyless father stops to make sure his son takes a moment to admire the view.

While they're out hunting, they spy a deer, and the son wanders off to get a better shot. While he's lining up his sights, he sees something in the woods watching him and standing upright. Before it can get into position for an attack, the dad shows up, furious that his son, Blake, disobeyed him, but immediately goes into protection mode once Blake tells him what he saw. The father, Grady, knowing more than he lets on, scrambles up a hunting blind and waits for the thing to come for them. It's incredibly tense as Grady aims his rifle, while an unknown, big thing starts climbing the ladder. It's in this scene that you realize that Grady is an asshole, yes, but he's an asshole to keep his son safe. They live in an unforgiving and remote land; it's a hard life, and as that encounter proved, it's very easy to die.

Later, Blake overhears his dad talking on a CB radio, trying to get a friend to help him hunt the thing because it's coming for his son. Naturally, Blake accidentally makes a noise, and Grady sees him. They let the tension hang there for a moment, with neither speaking, until the movie fades to black and we fast-forward 30 years. We meet an older Blake who is married with a daughter. He's a loving father, and we see a bit of his dad come out when his daughter puts herself in danger. He snaps and swears at her, then immediately calms himself. It's a little touch that I liked, and if he doesn't show it, I think deep down the character grew to understand his father a little bit once he had a kid himself.

Later, Blake gets a letter saying his dad has been declared dead, so he convinces his family to take a trip from their home in New York City to the Pacific Northwest. As I'm sure you guessed, they run afoul of a werewolf.

That's a bit more synopsis than I normally do, but I felt it was necessary from what I'm going to talk about. Do you remember the 2010 The Wolfman starring Fenster? I mean Benicio Del Toro? I didn't care for it. The main reason? I didn't care for his Larry Talbot. The entire movie, I was waiting for him to wolf out, and when he wasn't, I was bored. I think that's the problem with most werewolf movies: you don't care about the protagonist because they're not fun compared to the rampaging wolf. It's why I loved the original 1941 version with Lon Chaney Jr. You didn't want him to turn because you could see how much it pained him before and after the transformation. It was hard seeing the very nice man struggle with what he'd done while he was a monster. You didn't want him to turn because you felt sorry for him, and you were interested 100% of the time, not just 25%.

In general, this movie succeeds by doing something different. Outside of the opening scenes, the entire movie takes place in one night. You get to see the attack, the fight for survival, and the resolution without any breaks in between. It shows you the victim slowly losing his humanity until there's nothing left. Before writing the movie, the director had a friend who gradually died from ALS, and he wanted the transformation to be like that. Blake's turn doesn't happen all at once; his humanity slowly withered away until there was nothing left. You can see the struggle as he tries to protect the ones he loves, but he's losing the ability to communicate and understand what his family is saying. You want him to be able to fight it to protect his family, but he can't. It's so off-putting watching a scene of such violence, and then the wolfie just standing up and walking away like he wandered into a room and forgot why he went in there. And then the next second, you can see him stalking in the shadows. You never know what's going on in his head, because the character doesn't either.

Speaking of that, that leads to my favorite scene in the movie. The mother and daughter escaped the house and holed up in a barn. It's pitch black, and they can't see a thing. The mom is straining her eyes, holding a knife out in front of her, desperately trying to fend off something she can't see. The POV then switches to the Wolf Man, who can see in the dark. He is literally standing just a few feet from them, able to see the two perfectly. It's so cool because you realize just how helpless these two are. The movie shows them being resourceful and making close escapes, but this illustrates just how screwed they'd be if the human side of the monster wasn't holding it back.

As for the ending, I think it sticks the landing. It has an early callback and continues something that Blake and his daughter used to do during happier times. From what I read, not as many people enjoyed the ending, but I think it fit what the movie was going for. Like I said, I liked this movie more than most, and I stand by my grade of...

9 Dr. Chainsaws!