Wolf Man is a movie about Blake, a family man struggling to make his marriage work and to be a better man than his father was. When Blake gets a letter in the mail informing him that his father who went missing years earlier has finally been officially declared dead by the state, he and his family leave their busy city life to pack up his father’s old farmhouse and spend some time in the mountains. The wooded area surrounding the house is ominous and filled with local legends of men with the face of the wolf, but surely it’s a good idea to bring your wife and young daughter to live there for a summer. If I were to spend anymore time talking about the synopsis of this movie I would end up giving everything away as there isn’t much more to this film.

 When I saw the trailer for Wolfman I was disappointed. Except for An American Werewolf in London, I’ve never seen a werewolf movie that wasn’t extremely middle of the road, and from the marketing, this movie looked to be no different. But I was wrong. It was actually somehow a little worse than middle of the road. I was excited to see Julia Garner cast as the female lead because I’ve really enjoyed her performances in other things such as Ozark, Inventing Anna, and The Assistant. But I was surprised to find that her character was bland and uninteresting. At first, I figured she kind of butchered the role, but it soon became apparent that the real problem was the writing. The dialog felt cold and emotionless. Even during scenes that were supposed to be touching, suspenseful, or exciting, all of the characters seemed to deliver the most boring inhuman lines. The worst case of this was the daughter played by Matilda Firth. It was as if the writers had never met a child in real life and were just guessing at what a child might speak like. The result is a family that I couldn’t care less about. The reveal towards the end of the movie is very easy to see coming and I was able to call it about 10 minutes into the movie. The monster design is uninteresting, the movie drags on, and it gives no meaningful contribution to the werewolf subgenre.

Score 4/10