Leigh Whannell's 'Wolf Man' bites

And the first terrible movie of 2025 is...

In Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man,” there aren’t any full moon lycanthropic transformations, beastly howls in the night, pentagrams, magic gypsies, or silver bullets. For his contemporary update of the classic Universal Monster, Whannell dispenses with the folklore. Instead, he delivers a muddled metaphor for disease, a half baked family drama, lame special effects, and an insipid, mawkish performance from one of the worst child actors I’ve ever seen.

I went into “Wolf Man” with high hopes. Whannell is one of the more visionary and interesting filmmakers working in mainstream genre movies today. Along with James Wan, Whannell co-created the “Saw” and “Insidious” series, which are, of course, garbaggio, but also a lot of fun and magnificent in their own craptacular way.

As a director, Whannell has made a couple of genuinely great genre mashups in recent years. His 2018 under-the-radar sci-fi/body horror/action hybrid “Upgrade” was a gloriously stupid, ass-kicking ode to Paul Verhoeven’s American blockbuster period. (I highly recommend you get stoned and watch it on Netflix.) His version of “The Invisible Man,” with Elisabeth Moss, was twisted into a chilling, #MeToo-inspired psychological thriller about domestic abuse, is superb.

“Wolf Man” begins in rural Oregon (as played by New Zealand) in 1995. Some text over the screen explains to us that a hiker went missing and is believed to have caught a mysterious virus that has altered him physically and made him violent. Local generic “Indigenous people” (what tribe is never mentioned), call the virus “ma’iingan odengwaan,” which means “face of the wolf.”

A quick Google search tells me the word “ma’iingan” actually does translate as wolf in the Ojibwe language, however the Ojibwe Nation is located mostly around the Great Lakes and does not have any presence in Oregon. (Great job!) I guess Whannell and his unfortunately named co-writer Corbett Tuck (she’s his wife, not a “Drag Race” contestant) could not spare the 90 seconds it took me to ascertain that information through two simple Google searches.

“Wolf Man” opens sometime after that hiker has gone missing in 1995. We see an isolated house in the middle of a breathtaking, verdant valley. A foreboding KEEP OUT sign, along with bars on the windows, and security cameras tell us that, despite the setting, this isn’t some rustic idyll. The house is inhabited by Grady (Sam Jaeger) and his son, Blake. We never get a good sense of why they’re living like this. Is Grady some frothing-at-the-mouth, anti-government sovereign citizen type? Is he just an earnest back-to-the-lander, traumatized by modern society, who wanted to raise his son off the grid? And where the hell is Blake’s never mentioned mother? (There are more single fathers in Hollywood movies than there are in real life.)

Either way, Grady seems sort of taciturn and unpleasant. He makes Blake go hunting with him, barking out orders at the boy the entire time. Screaming at his son not to eat a poisonous mushroom or not to walk in front of him while he’s shooting his gun are presented as examples of Grady being a bad father. (In Grady’s defense, clearly the kid is some kind of fucking imbecile.) While hunting, they encounter some sort of beastie that nearly kills them.

Fast forward thirty years to present day. Blake (played by a very lost Christopher Abbott) is now a stay at home dad in San Francisco. He has a daughter named Ginger. They repeatedly do a bit together where Blake asks Ginger what he’s thinking and – in the most insufferable, vomit-inducing voice – she responds, “That you love your little girl!”

When we are first introduced to the irritating pint sized twit, Ginger is dressed like a unicorn and going bonkers, begging her dad for ice cream. She hops up on a traffic barrier, and even though you’ve only known Ginger for 30 seconds, you desperately hope she will fall into the street and get run over by a bus. There’s no way you want to spend the next 103 minutes around this idiot child, who is such a cloying presence, she makes Jake Lloyd in “The Phantom Menace” look like Laurence fucking Olivier.

Alas, Ginger does not fall into traffic, nor does she get hit by a bus. Nor does she die when she encounters a threatening homeless man, as much as you wish he would stab her or even just molest her in a terrible way that will cause her to never speak again. Ginger does not die when Blaker drives a moving van off a cliff – though you may wish to see her fly through the window and smash into a tree, instantly pulverizing her tiny body into mush. Nor does she die when she encounters the titular Wolf Man – he doesn’t maul her or eat her or scrape her stupid little face off. Spoiler alert: She never dies. Oh, why, you find yourself asking god – even if you do not believe in him – oh, why will this annoying little shit not die? Actually, for that matter, why didn’t Ginger’s mother abort her when she was a fetus?

The woman whose health care plans should have included a D&C about 8 years ago is Charlotte (Julia Garner in a totally thankless role). She’s a journalist. That’s right, a journalist is sustaining her husband – who does not work – and her daughter, while also paying rent on a giant ass apartment in present day San Francisco. In a movie where people turn into monsters, this is the most fantastical element. In short order, Charlotte will take a sabbatical from her job to follow her husband into the woods, which one might assume would be a costly financial decision. But money doesn’t seem to be one of Charlotte and Blake’s problems.

That’s not to say they’re a happy, loving couple. The moment she walks through the door, Charlotte and Blake begin to bicker. They fight in a way that makes you very aware that you are watching two actors perform dialogue that is supposed to indicate they are in a bad marriage.

“When I get married, I’m never going to fight with my husband in front of my kids,” Ginger screeches. You find yourself hoping Blake will pick up the pot of boiling water in front of him and throw it in his daughter’s face. Fortunately, like an earlier scene where Blake blows his stack and starts screaming at Ginger, suggesting he might have a rage problem, the conflict between the couple is isolated to the opening minutes of the film and never brought up again.

Blake receives word in the mail that his father has “finally been legally declared dead.” The letter is practically a blinking red sign that tells you the identity of the Wolf Man. That’s not a spoiler. Even the dumb bitch sitting next to me in the theater, who looked at her phone for the entire duration of the movie, exclaimed, “Oh, shit, he’s the Wolf Man!”

Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger take a giant moving van up to Oregon to “empty out” Grady’s house. (This is an odd detail to include, because once they get to Grady’s house, it appears to have been cleared of most of his belongings. Also, Charlotte quit her job to help her husband move a couple of old couches??) On their way to the cabin, Blake sees something in the road, causing the aforementioned crash that Ginger unfortunately survives. The creature scratches Blake and then lays chase to the family, who end up barricaded in Blake’s childhood home.

This is where the narrative seems to both accelerate and turn to sludge at the same time. While the monster stalks around the house, Blake becomes ill. Whannel’s big innovation here is that he makes turning into a werewolf a disease, rather than a curse. If this was some sort of commentary on COVID, it’s not a very smart or coherent one.

Blake pisses himself in front of his daughter. (Hilarious!) Then his face gets kind of swollen and nasty looking. Weirdly, he doesn’t grow hair, he sheds it. Teeth and nails fall out. If “The Substance” hadn’t established a new gold standard for this kind of Cronenberg-inspired gross out body horror just a few months ago, maybe some of this would be shocking. Instead, under layers of latex, Abbott’s unimpressive transmogrification is merely just a bit icky.

Even less effective is when Blake loses his ability to speak or understand spoken language. Whannell switches into “wolf vision,” a ugly bit of CGI that resembles an “Avatar” filter on Instagram. If making everything psychedelic blue wasn’t goofy enough, Charlotte and Ginger sound to Blake’s ears like Charlie Brown’s teacher in the “Peanuts” cartoon specials. It’s funny, but it’s not supposed to be.

All of this seems rushed, unearned, and like it’s happening too quickly. Yet it’s all so boring, sitting through it all makes you feel like you too have come down with ma’iingan odengwaan. “Wolf Man” is about as understandable as “WAH WAH WAH WAH WAHHH.”

“Wolf Man” is now in theaters.