It’ll be good for us.
So Blake Lovell tells his go-getter wife, Charlotte, when he suggests they leave the city and spend a summer in Oregon.
They’ve had a rough time of it lately. Blake, a writer, is between jobs right now—and that means he’s been a full-time dad to their daughter, Ginger. That’s been great; the two of them have never been closer.
But that also makes Charlotte, an ambitious journalist with an eye on deadlines and a hunger for the front page, a familial third wheel.
While Blake makes dinner, Charlotte’s arguing with her editor. While Blake takes Ginger out for ice cream, Charlotte runs after the latest scandal. And while that’s great for Charlotte’s career and all, Charlotte feels less like Ginger’s mom and more like a houseguest—and not an always welcome one at that. She and Blake are arguing more than ever. And if the couple keeps following this trajectory, they won’t be a couple much longer.
A trip to Oregon might be just the ticket, Blake feels, to heal these long-festering issues.
After all, he’ll need to go to Oregon anyway. His long-missing father has finally been officially declared dead by the state. Blake needs to pack up the old family house and tie up loose ends.
So he thinks, why don’t they all go? Spend some time together? After all, Charlotte can work from anywhere. Or, hey, she could even take a vacation for once. No harm getting reacquainted with your husband and daughter, right? Plus, it’s beautiful there. The views never get old.
Sure, Blake might’ve downplayed just how remote this corner of Oregon was. Internet? You’ll be lucky to have power. And he never even thinks to dredge up some less-idyllic childhood memories; ones that left his granite-tough father trembling. Ones about a monster in the woods.
Blake had long waved away such legends. Monster? Pish.
But then, as he drives a moving van carrying his small family, someone—something—appears in the headlights. The van careens off the road and tumbles through trees, precariously coming to a stop in the branches of one of them. Charlotte and Ginger scamper to relative safety. But the thing swipes at Blake before he can do the same. The attack takes less time than an eye blink—so fast that when Blake sees the blood on his arm, he assumes he must’ve suffered a cut from the glass.
Charlotte looks at the jagged wound, and she knows it’s not a simple cut. Nope, that thing took a chunk out of Blake’s arm. And who knows what sort of bacteria that creature was carrying. Rabies? Tetanus? Best get Blake to a doctor, pronto.
She’s right to be worried. Blake is infected—but not by something a doctor can treat with a shot or antibiotics.
The trip to Oregon? It’ll be good for us, Blake promised.
But that might not be a promise that Blake can keep.
Pre-bite, Blake and Ginger have a sweet little routine. When Blake asks Ginger what his job as a father is, she says that it’s to keep her safe. And her job? It’s to read minds.
“What am I thinking right now?” Blake will ask.
“That I love my daughter very much,” Ginger answers. And unfailingly, Ginger is always right.
Blake loves Charlotte, too, even as they’re going through a rough patch. When Blake learns that his dad has officially been proclaimed dead, he tells Charlotte that she and Ginger make up his only family now. And he wants to treasure that family as much as he can.
Those good intentions are made significantly more difficult by, shall we say, unforeseen circumstances. That bite does Blake no good. And as he begins to change, it’s clear their family will deal with some (ahem) difficult trials. But in the midst of those trials, we see some pretty touching moments.
Blake struggles against his changing nature and does his best to protect his wife and daughter. Ginger can be incredibly sensitive and insightful as her beloved father goes through those changes. And Charlotte? Well, her dual roles as wife and mother are challenged like never before. But she meets those challenges without flinching and proves largely equal to them.
Historically, werewolves have often had a religious or supernatural component to them. Accused werewolves from bygone centuries often claimed (under torture) that they received their powers through the devil. In the original Wolf Man from 1941, the monster’s next victim is habitually revealed via a pentagram; the monster itself can only be vanquished with a silver bullet (because pure silver could destroy evil); and, of course, the moon played a huge part in the Wolf Man’s transformation.
The 2025 Wolf Man scraps all that. We’re dealing with just a flat-out infectious disease here. In fact, Wolf Man doesn’t contain a whiff of religion at all. The closest we get to anything even remotely spiritual is the smallest suggestion that Blake’s and Ginger’s mind-reading game may be more than just a game.
We see Blake without his shirt—but by that time, his chest doesn’t look particularly human anyway.
So, spoiler alert: Wolf Man features a wolf man. More than one, actually. And these humanoid critters aren’t shy about shedding a little blood—including their own.
Blake’s initial wound is pretty grotesque—but it’s also just a simple, bloody gash. (His wife painfully disinfects it with rubbing alcohol.) But when Charlotte removes the blood-soaked bandages later, the arm looks much, much worse, appearing to be just a skinless mass of muscle and sinew. Blake, now in full-on transformation mode, worries about the arm as a dog would worry a wound on its leg: He licks and gnaws it, leaving his mouth a mass of blood.
It’s not the only (ahem) worrisome part of this unnatural change. He loses a couple of teeth, which he spits out with a ton of blood. He pulls out chunks of hair. Fingernails are pushed out in favor of claws, and—even though the creatures we see here are recognizably humanoid—some painful skeletal and muscular re-arrangements take place, too.
A creature gnaws off his own foot. Critters are stabbed and hit with metal objects. One has its throat torn out. One is shot. Monsters fight and wrestle with each other, leading to unconsciousness or death.
But the beasts do their own share of damage, of course, too. One apparently bites off several fingers (and vomits one out in a stream of blood). People and animals are ripped open. And while the actual attacks take place off-camera, we see the bodies with their grotesque, gaping injuries. One smashes through a window and rips a shift lever off a steering column. Claws tear through the plastic fabric of a makeshift greenhouse, looking to grab the terrified people above. Someone’s nearly pulled through a doggy door. One character apparently expresses a desire to end it all.
The crash scene involving the moving van feels quite jarring. People are thrown around on the inside of the cab as the van rolls down the hillside, and someone falls out—landing perhaps 10 feet beneath the van and clearly injured. (Remember, the van is suspended in the branches of a huge tree.) People are clawed and injured by creatures. Someone grasps a knife blade with bare hands—doing all the damage you’d expect.
In the city, Ginger walks along the top of some traffic barrels beside a busy street, scaring Blake badly. (He snaps at Ginger, then apologizes for getting mad.) In a flashback, we see the house that Blake was raised in. A sign near the door depicts a gun, joined by the words, “There is nothing in here worth dying for.”
The movie hints that Blake’s father—though well-meaning—might have been physically abusive.
Despite Ginger’s pleas for her father not to swear (and exacting a dollar every time he does), Blake and others can’t seem to help it. We hear three f-words and about a half-dozen s-words. We also hear “d–n,” “h—” and a few misuses of God’s name, twice paired with the word “d–n.”
As Blake prepares dinner and Charlotte talks with her editor over the phone, we see a bottle and a couple of glasses of wine on the dinner table.
A character messily vomits. Well-meaning lies are told. We learn that Blake had been estranged from his father. He admits to his daughter that they’d not talked for several years, but when the death certificate arrived, all of a sudden he wanted to talk to his dad desperately.
“Do you want to get hurt?”
So Grady Lovell tells his young son, Blake, 30 years before—grasping the boy’s shoulder roughly has he does so—after Blake unexpectedly scampers through the woods alone. The scene neatly encompasses the father’s fear of his son getting lost, injured or killed by who knows what in the forest. But the scene comes with an unsettling undercurrent. The edge in Grady’s voice, and Blake’s obvious fear, suggests that in that moment, Blake’s not scared of what might lurk in the woods: He’s scared of his father.
And that brings us to Wolf Man’s most compelling messages. As Blake says again and again, it’s a father’s job to protect his family. But what should we make of a family that needs protection … from the father?
Those twin themes give Wolf Man added peril and poignancy. As Blake changes into a creature of nightmare, we can see the struggle in both Charlotte and Ginger. They love Blake, but they fear him. They want to help—but if they literally get too close, will he eat them?
Ginger’s tenderness toward her beloved-but-changing father is particularly compelling. And while most of us don’t know what it’s like to have a family member change into a werewolf, many know what it’s like to see someone they love lash out—under the influence of alcohol or rage or pain Those sorts of wounds, so literally on display in Wolf Man, are so often hidden in our own homes.
But those themes aren’t the only elements played out in Wolf Man. Blood oozes. Guts spill. This R-rated movie is just as gruesome as you’d expect. The language can get pretty sullied, too.
Do you want to get hurt? Blake’s dad asks. Well, movies can hurt us, too. And even though Wolf Man comes with some interesting undercurrents, the movie’s most obvious flow comes with plenty of blood.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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