'Out Come The Wolves' (2024) Movie Review

I'm a sucker for any movie that's going along fine but then is all... "and now there are wolves." (Insert any variety of killer animal.) The hook here, in Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves, is the wolves, but that’s not really the point. The eponymous predators don’t show up until relatively late in the game—you know it’s coming, it’s right there in the title and prominently featured in all the marketing—but things are already harrowing and conflict-riddled enough by the time our furry pals appear.

 

Though he also directed heavy-metal horror Pyewacket, MacDonald seems to have a bit of a thing for stripped-down sagas of Missy Peregrym battling rogue wildlife in the remote wilderness. His 2014 film Backcountry saw the Stick It star face off against a pissed off bear and the general set up here is not too dissimilar. Although this outing may be even more bare bones. There three people and wolves, nothing else.

 

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Bowhunter-turned-vegan Sophie (Peregrym) takes her magazine editor fiancé Nolan (Damon Runyan) to meet her childhood BFF Kyle (Joris Jarsky, who, along with MacDonald has as story-by credit, though Enuka Okuma has the sole screenplay nod). As the boys are out hunting—the purpose of the trip is for Nolan to get in touch with some sort of inner man-ness and write about it—they’re attacked by a pack of wolves and, as expected, it becomes an all-out fight for survival. 

 

As I said, the wolves don’t join the party until we’re fairly deep into the narrative. Until then, the tension derives from the push and pull of opposites. There’s the conflict between Sophie’s old life as an outdoorsy girl who hunted and was most at home in the woods, with who she is now. There’s city versus county, rugged nature versus civilized society, and Kyle’s manly man juxtaposed against Nolan’s mannered, affected city boy. Sophie and Kyle have all kinds of history, and there are, to be sure, a few secrets and skeletons buried along the way. This is already a tense, fraught cauldron of simmering pressure and interpersonal strife, and then, again, the film introduces the wolves.

 

[Related Reading: 'Project Wolf Hunting' Movie Review]

Out Come the Wolves doesn’t do anything particularly surprising or unexpected, and it isn’t the most memorable movie or one we’ll likely talk about much down the line. However, what it delivers in the moment is a taught, effective, woman-versus-nature survival thriller. It’s exciting and harrowing, there’s a decent amount of gnarly, visceral gore, and it harkens back to ‘70s animal attack grindhouse features. (This is the kind of movie where the sound designers insert snarling animal roars in lieu of ATV motors, and it even goes out on a grainy freeze-frame of a character’s aggrieved face.) This doesn’t blow any minds, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do, tell an exciting, engaging story that entertains for about 90 minutes. And sometimes that’s enough.