A friend found this movie for us and we ended up all going together. I wasn’t sold on the trailer and went mostly for the friend hang-out, but this movie positively surprised me so much that it became my second favorite horror movie of the year so far.
Wolf Man (2025)
A young boy grows up with his father in the woods. The father is strict and violent and claims to be so to protect his son from what is hiding in the forest. When decades later the estranged father is declared dead, the son, who now has a daughter and a slightly struggling marriage, and his family revisit his childhood home and get confronted with his childhood curse.
Spoilers from here on out
I like it when movies have a theme and stick to it. My favorite horror uses the horrific happenstances, the monster out to get you, as allegory for something else. To say it with tumblr user valtsv’s words “the symbolism is Real and Trying to Kill You”.
The symbolism here is generational trauma. Because it turns out, the werewolf menacing the son and his family is not what was waiting in the woods for him as a child but his own father; his father who now in turn infects him with the werewolf curse.
Watching the trailer it was already clear that the husband, Blake, would be turning into a werewolf during the course of the movie and it looked like the mother, Charlotte, and daughter, Ginger, would have to defend against him as well. I was pleasantly surprised when that did not turn out to be the case. While the transformation is unsettling both for mother and daughter as well as for Blake himself - made visible and tangible for the audience with distorted vision and him gradually losing the ability to parse speech - he is never a danger to them, even when they fear it. In fact, he protects them from his father and in the end chooses death over harming anyone else and passing the curse on, and thus breaking the cycle.
The beauty of this is that you could already see Blake’s refusal to pass on the metaphorical family curse when early on the daughter behaves thoughtlessly and almost gets hurt. His own father treated him like a soldier and here he raises his voice at his daughter in alarm. But instead of justifying his actions and doubling down as his own father would have, Blake promptly apologizes for it, gently explains why her behavior was dangerous and reaffirms his love for her.
The movie is straight-forward in its plot and theming and contains emotional moments like the repeated ritual Blake has with his daughter that shows their love for each other. It is wonderfully self-contained creature transformation horror and makes me very glad for the scrapping of Universal’s “Dark Universe” without which it never would have existed.
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