Of all the werewolf movies I expected to be disappointed by, one made by Leigh Whannell definitely wouldn't have been among them.

I can't pretend to know him, but I've interviewed him in my day job as a film reporter a few times and it makes something that's evident in his films even more obvious – the guys knows and loves horror and monsters. All of which makes the sting of what a letdown the werewolf effects/creature visual is even worse.

Here's the thing. Whannell has watched and loves all the great werewolf movies the rest of us have (I guarantee it), and like any fan, he knows what makes a good versus a rubbish monster movie (more below). When it came time to decide what the monster looked like and how the mythology worked, he would have thought long and hard – and had his creative departments – work long and hard to make a good one.

His decision was to make the werewolf a thing that gradually takes over a man and makes him slightly wolf-like (sharp, bloody teeth, a slightly shaggier pelt than a human male would have), slightly larger muscles and super strength, etc), more like a sickness than a superpower.

The transforming once a month under the full moon is gone – but that's been done in plenty of other great werewolf stories (see The Howling), so that's not a dealbreaker.

But even though the visual of a werewolf makes sense according to the world the movie builds and he's too good a director not to have it end up exactly the way he envisioned, it's still not much of a werewolf. It's made even more disappointing by the fact that the creature is kept hidden or in shadow until the 2/3 mark – a failed promise that we're going to see something amazing soon.

But the other letdown is star Christopher Abbott as hero Blake. He's been engaging enough in other movies but here, maybe because he has to carry a lot more drama by himself, he's just very inert. Julia Warner as his wife Ginger is much better.

We start with the boyhood Blake being taken hunting by his fearsome authoritarian father, during which they see something terrible in the woods, only just escaping from the creature with their lives.

Years later, living in San Francisco with a wife and cute daughter, Blake is informed that his father (whom he no longer talks to) has been missing for so long they're declaring him dead and wrapping up his affairs. He persuades Ginger to bring their daughter and come with him to the remote backwoods home to clean it out and finalise it for sale.

Their relationship has been strained because their daughter seems closer to Blake, but he also has a temper we've already seen in him, a seeming nod to the monster he's going to end up that's never really paid off (unless there was something about how the werewolf infection/curse latches onto negativity and I missed it).

So they make the trip, and it's when they're driving through the woods trying to find the house (along with Blake's creepy neighbour, who also grew up in the area) that they veer off the road to miss something standing in their path, crashing the van and leaving them shaken but mostly unhurt.

Something chases them back to the house and they only just lock themselves inside in time, and with no reception (naturally) they're stuck there overnight, trying to figure out how to stay safe and get help.

But the thing that attacked them managed to get a decent scratch on Blake's arm, so he starts to change. He blacks out, then wakes up with extreme night vision. He tears the bandage off his arm and starts eating his own flesh. Ginger, naturally, is freaking out, trying to take care of her husband and wondering what he's turning into and what kind of threat he might post against her and their child.

It becomes a race against time – Blake still has enough awareness to know he doesn't want to hurt his family despite the bloodlust starting to drive him (especially handy when the original creature comes calling again and he has to fight it off), but he's aware it won't last, and eventually a hunger for flesh and the final loss of any humanity will see him turn on them.

I didn't know any of this, but the critical and commercial failure might have been because bad luck hobbled the whole thing. Universal released a look at the werewolf design at a con, a move Whannell apparently knew nothing about and complained about to production company head Jason Blum. I think it's more likely they just panicked when they realised how shit their make-up was.

Then, it was one of the movies whose premiere was called off as the Palisades and Altadena fires ravaged Los Angeles, losing a critical claim usually staked in the media and driving word of mouth.

Being a sub-par movie with a kind of sloppy script and a rubbish monster put the last nail in the coffin, and after the success of Whannell's take on The Invisible Man, it probably signalled the end of the filmmaker-first, standalone movie series of Universal digging up and rebooting the classic monsters from its vault, and that was after the end of their Dark Universe connected MCU (monster connected universe), killed off by Tom Cruise's dire iteration of The Mummy.