Director: Leigh Whannell

Cast: Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott, Sam Jaeger, Matilda Firth

Synopsis:

A man must protect himself and his family when they are being stalked, terrorized, and haunted by a deadly werewolf at night during a full moon. But as the night stretches on, the man begins to behave strangely.

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One of the canniest recent decisions by a major studio saw Universal apparently shuffle from the disastrous Dark Universe horror series – officially launched with that awful Tom Cruise take on The Mummy – to far cheaper stand-alone projects made by Blumhouse Productions. The new team’s Wolf Man, acknowledged successor to Universal’s 1941 film The Wolf Man, is not quite the equal of their fabulous The Invisible Man, from 2020, but this is a lean, emotionally satisfying shocker that honours the great tradition while finding new ways of turning the stomach.

We begin with a prologue in which young Blake is hunting in the Oregon wilderness with his aggressive dad. Somewhere in the woods they encounter a sinister, hairy humanoid with a taste for lurking just out of clear vision. Decades later, in San Francisco, Blake (now Christopher Abbott) is doing everything possible to be nicer to his daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), than his dad was to him.

© Irish Times