OUT COME THE WOLVES (2024)

New in select theaters and On Demand from IFC Films!
Directed by Adam MacDonald.
Written by Adam MacDonald, Joris Jarsky, Enuka Okuma.
Starring Missy Peregrym, Joris Jarsky, Damon Runyan
Check out the trailer here!!

Tensions flare when a childhood friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) visits Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and her soon to be husband Nolan (Damon Runyan) at their cabin in the woods. While one there might have been a relationship between Kyle and Sophie, she assures Nolan that Kyle is just a friend now. Nolan is writing an article for the magazine he is working with and since Sophie doesn’t hunt anymore, she invites Kyle to teach him the rules of the hunt with a gun and bow. But when tragedy occurs on their trip into the woods, it’s up to Sophie to gear up and venture into the woods to rescue them from a hungry pack of wolves.

If there’s one lesson to be learned, it’s that it is always a bad idea to go into the woods with Missy Peregrym. In director Adam MacDonald’s last movie, BACKCOUNTRY, Missy Peregrym and her boyfriend go into the wild so the boyfriend can propose to her. What transpired was the most vicious bear attack sequence put to film. MacDonald follows that survival thriller with OUT COME THE WOLVES, and just as Peregrym’s character makes things emotionally complex by saying no to the proposal in BACKCOUNTRY, she plays the apple of both her fiancé and longtime friend’s eyeballs. MacDonald seems to love combining wilderness terror with complex and uncomfortable emotional drama in his films and while it worked in BACKCOUNTRY, the emotional conflict proves to be a little too convoluted this time around. There are quite a lot of icky emotions flying around as Nolan is jealous, Kyle is an emotional wreck because he believes there is something between him and Sophie, and Sophie is caught in the middle of this tug of war between two men she loves. It’s one of those situations where no one is going to come out unscathed. Sure that makes for some decent drama but while BACKCOUNTRY interspersed that drama with survival horror pretty evenly, OUT COMES THE WOLVES is font loaded with all of that emotional setup and leaves the wolf-punching to the latter half.

Now there is a lot of wolf on Peregrym action in OUT COME THE WOLVES. There are a few gnarly scenes of wolf chomping and bone breaking and the like, but I kind of checked out by the time all of that came to pass. The drama was too heavy and I felt there really was nothing Peregrym does during the wolf fight that Liam Neeesons hadn’t done before in THE GREY. Missy Peregrym is trying to be this wilderness badass and while she is quite athletic and tough, the action felt more comic booky than the gritty, down to earth tumble in the jungle with the bear in BACKCOUNTRY.

My advice: never go in the woods with Missy Peregrym. Also watch BACKCOUNTRY for a much more concise, hardcore, and raw film. OUT COME THE WOLVES tries to tell the same kind of story with wolves instead of bears and it just didn’t work for me.