Justin Long and Kate Bosworth pair up in this eco-horror that entertains, despite issues with execution
There’s a reason that animal attack films like Jaws, Anaconda, Lake Placid, Crawl, and Cocaine Bear keep cropping up in the moviemaking cycle. Our enduring natural instincts that instill in us an enduring fear of the natural world and its many threats. For film, this primal fear of nature is often leveraged into works walking a tightrope between genuine terror and dark comedy. Coyotes, directed by Colin Minihan (What Keeps You Alive), plants its flag squarely in the middle. Part survival horror, part family drama, part pulpy creature feature. It doesn’t always hit its mark, but when it does, it has plenty of bite.
Set against the smog-choked glamour of the Hollywood Hills, Coyotes introduces its cast of characters with a pop art flourish keying you into a playful tone that persists, but is put into the shade as a crisis takes hold. Local wildfires are overwhelming the area as well as the emergency services. Felled trees are blocking roads and taking down power lines. It’s not just the denizens of the two isolated homes we center on that are being impacted, but also a pack of coyotes, forced out of the fringes of the city into its populated areas by the very fires now wreaking havoc in suburbia. Threatened and hungry, they sense the panic and vulnerabilities of these folk and start to encroach into their very homes.
The film wastes no time establishing its stakes, its setting, and its slow-simmering sense of isolation. A tree crashes onto a car, the cell towers go down, and what starts as an uncomfortable evening quickly transforms into a after-dark siege. At the center of the chaos are Scott (Justin Long, Barbarian), Liv (Kate Bosworth), and their daughter Chloe (Mila Harris), who are trying to weather both the literal and emotional storms upending their lives.
The script from Nick Simon (The Pyramid, The Girl in the Photographs) and Tad Daggerhart (The Expendables 4) wisely keeps a focus on the family unit, and works in a natural sense of comedy to complement the escalating chaos. The dialogue often leans into quirks and euphemisms, but the performances sell it. The family dynamics, particularly the tension between stepfather Scott and Chloe, are surprisingly effective and become the emotional backbone of the film’s more outrageous elements.
Long and Bosworth (real-life partners) bring a believable, sympathetic chemistry to their roles and form a nice, relatable family dynamic with Harris. They’re joined by Norbert Leo Butz as their rat-infested neighbor Trip, and his Brittany Allen as his ‘lady-friend’ Jules, who adds both tension and comic relief. But it’s Keir O’Donnell as Devon, a local pest controller, who makes the most of his minimal screentime.
What sets Coyotes apart from most creature features, is in depicting a threat made up of many, rather than one hulking apex predator. Theres something all the more unnerving about being torn apart piece by piece, rather than being taken out by a killer blow. The element of surprise, and pack hinting strategy is well milked to build tension of deliver some effective jump scares. The ecological themes about urban sprawl, habitat destruction, and nature eventually pushing back, are always timely, and here work well in service of the horror components, without detracting from them.
What holds Coyotes back from being truly great is its technical inconsistency. The sound design in particular is a recurring problem. Coyote howls, growls, and environmental noises are heavily laid over the visuals, rather than feeling like an organic part of the world. At times, the score even drowns out the dialogue. Editing is occasionally off-tempo, with awkward cuts that disrupt the flow or undermine suspense. The early animal effects also feel disconnected, and clunky, while the latter half better sell the creature threat with more solid effects work and kinetic cuts.
Despite these issues, Coyotes works, especially when it goes for broke. The film’s final act, where all hell breaks loose and the coyotes feel like real, physical threats, is engaging and often thrilling. There’s a dark streak too, that bubbles up in the chaos, giving the film welcome mean streak. Coyotes is savage and stylish, just a bit scrappy around the edges.
Coyotes packs into theaters on October 3rd
