In short: Daughter of the Wolf (2019)

Just after Clair Hamilton (Gina Carano) has returned home from military service to bury her father and take care of her estranged teenage son Charlie (Anton Gillis-Adelman), Charlie is kidnapped. The kidnappers do ask for a ransom consisting of basically all the money Clair has, but they still plan on selling Charlie off to someone even if they get the money. Their leader, only known as Father (Richard Dreyfuss, of all people now also in a low budget direct to home video career phase) we will learn during the course of the movie, has some rather personal reasons for the whole affair, as well as a pretty perverse sense of morality.

Fortunately for Charlie, Clair is well up for hunting a bunch of criminals through the snowy mountains, even teaming up with one among their number (Brendan Fehr) who has a bit of a conscience as well as the kind of tragic backstory that lends itself to a bout of redemptive action. There’s also a wolf pack hanging around the borders of the narrative, threatening, attacking, and sometimes helping, sometimes feeling like real animals, sometimes as if the film would turn them into creatures of myth any scene now.


David Hackl’s Daughter of the Wolf is a somewhat successful entry into the survivalist thriller sweepstakes, often making good use of the snowy woods of British Columbia and the action movie heroine talents of Gina Carano (who could kick your ass in real life, so is rather plausible kicking fictional ass). Carano’s a decent actress by now when she doesn’t shoot someone, too, so there’s never the feeling the whole film’s point is only about the violence. Of course, while it does have a somewhat thoughtful manner, and does put more than a little effort into building up the screwed up family values of Father, as well as giving most characters who would be only canon fodder in other films a bit of a personality and background, the characters are still very much stock types going through stock situations. And even though Hackl does a good job with action as well as dialogue scenes (not something to be taken for granted in the low budget action and thriller bracket), he doesn’t exactly make the material sing or feel real. It’s a workmanlike job, I suppose, elevated by Carano, Dreyfuss and the landscape to be never less than entertaining.