Curator Watchlist
A lavish, old-school monster movie with strong atmosphere, period detail, and committed performances, but it’s also uneven, overstuffed, and sometimes more impressive in pieces than as a whole. If you want a serious, bloody studio werewolf tragedy, it has enough gothic scale to be worth a look.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 43m
Director: Joe Johnston
Starring: Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt
Lawrence Talbot, an American man on a visit to Victorian London to make amends with his estranged father, gets bitten by a werewolf and, after a moonlight transformation, leaves him with a savage hunger for flesh.
Joe Johnston
Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt
A lavish, old-school monster movie with strong atmosphere, period detail, and committed performances, but it’s also uneven, overstuffed, and sometimes more impressive in pieces than as a whole. If you want a serious, bloody studio werewolf tragedy, it has enough gothic scale to be worth a look.
The Wolfman aims for grand, tragic monster-movie grandeur, and for stretches it gets there. The film leans hard into foggy Victorian dread, lavish sets, and a mournful, old-studio-horror mood that feels unusually expensive and tactile for a mainstream horror release of its era. When it works, it feels like a sincere attempt to resurrect the Universal monster tradition with bloodier teeth.
Its biggest strength is the atmosphere: the costumes, locations, and production design do a lot of heavy lifting, and the creature material has a satisfying feral brutality. The cast commits fully, especially in the more theatrical moments, which helps the movie sell its melodramatic, doom-laden tone.
But the film is also clunky and overextended, with a narrative that can feel messy and characters that are more functional than fully drawn. It’s the kind of movie that inspires admiration for its ambition more often than love for its execution. Still, if you’re in the mood for a somber, blood-soaked gothic creature feature, it has a distinctive appeal.
Patrick Willems (3★) · 1078 likes
It’s not great but this is probably the last time a mainstream studio horror movie could really be described as “lavish.” Real sets! Shot on film! Hopkins hamming it up! A big budget you can see onscreen!
matt lynch (3★) · 451 likes
Mostly I'm a sucker for a bipedal werewolf in a torn up suit howling at the moon from a London rooftop. Hokey but secure in its lack of irony, and pretty bloody too. Want to give extra points for Anthony Hopkins in hammy Van-Helsing-from-Coppola's-DRACULA mode, but they'd be cancelled out for wasting Emily Blunt.
Joe A (3★) · 421 likes
Say what you want about this version of Wolf Man, which is riddled with issues, at least this one features a full moon. Podcast Ep. 210- Wolf Man (2025)
haley (2.5★) · 357 likes
the way the werewolf ran looked strangely similar to 7 year old me pretending to be a horse
nathaxnne [goodbye <3] (4.5★) · 343 likes
The Wolfman captures the spirit, the feeling and the texture of watching the original run of Universal Monster movies more than I thought would be possible, with the welcome addition of werewolf-inflicted disembowelments, decapitations, sundry other maimings & loss of limb. In keeping with its source material, there is a kind of overstuffed clunk and quaint literalness to the proceedings that if one is not a fan of the original The Wolf Man might seem laborious, but I was delighted. I
The foundational Universal werewolf tragedy; essential if you want the original template for the story’s cursed-family melancholy.
A classic, somber werewolf tale with strong gothic mood and a more tragic, folkloric sensibility.
A sharp, character-driven werewolf film that turns transformation into a painful coming-of-age tragedy.
Dreamlike, literary, and deeply gothic, with a fairy-tale approach to lycanthropy and desire.
A more straightforward small-town werewolf story that still delivers strong creature-feature satisfaction.
For viewers who want werewolf violence with grit, tension, and a leaner, more muscular genre engine.
A thoughtful, older-protagonist werewolf film that plays the curse as a grim bodily and emotional decline.
A prestige-leaning monster drama that mixes transformation horror with adult melancholy and star power.
For the lavish, old-world gothic production design and operatic horror tone that this film reaches for.
Another ornate, fog-drenched period horror piece with a similar love of atmosphere and stylized dread.
A big studio monster revival with adventure scale, practical flair, and a strong sense of pulpy spectacle.
A maximalist Universal-monster throwback that shares the same broad studio ambition and creature-pageantry.
transformation, family curse, gothic horror, Victorian London, monstrosity, inheritance and trauma, dual nature, fate and doom
gothic horror, werewolf, Victorian era, monster remake, atmospheric, blood-soaked, period setting, melodrama, practical effects, tragic horror