Out Come the Wolves (2024)

Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and her fiancée Nolan (Damon Runyan) have come to Sophie’s old cabin home in the sticks so Nolan can have an actual hunting experience he feels he needs for an article he’s writing. Sophie isn’t into hunting anymore and has even turned vegan, so she has asked her childhood friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) to take Nolan out hunting for a day while she stays at the cabin. Kyle comes complete with a never resolved and pretty damn unhealthy longing for Sophie and an alcohol problem you can practically smell through the screen.

Tensions mount between the three even the evening before the hunt, and it is this very human shittiness that’ll make the situation much worse when the hunters encounter a pack of very hungry wolves in the woods and things devolve from there in exactly the ways you’d fear them to.

Most people, me most certainly included, go into animal attack movies for the animal attacks, and expect the human business to be relegated to filler and other things you really want a movie to get over with to get to the meat of proceedings.

That’s not at all the case with Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves – here, it’s the naturalistic portrayal of a very human situation that might have ended in violence even without the wolves that drags you in and hold you. The actor trio clearly understand this, and so really get their teeth into their roles and the performances, treating the human business as a serious drama that’s just as important as all the wolf fighting later on. This creates an impressive amount of tension before the hunt starts, and leaves a viewer with the proper amount of dread, the more cosmicist sibling of suspense. It is not at all about the question that things will go wrong, it’s only how they will go wrong. If you want, you can even read the wolves more as a hungry metaphor bringing to life all the repressed feelings of the characters, nature, particularly the red in tooth and claw kind of the hunt, bringing out the worst in people.

MacDonald presents the action part of the film with an admirable relentlessness, a direct brutality that makes a wonderful contrast to the cold beauty of his nature photography. There’s a sense of desperation to the final act most films of this kind can’t hope to grasp – but then, most films of this kind don’t put this much effort into creating actual characters to confront nature (the outside one as well as their own).