Nature Bites Back in Carnivorously Chilling Out Come the Wolves
Between Backcountry, Pyewacket, and now Out Come the Wolves, I suspect that heading out into the woods with director Adam MacDonald could be an exceptionally bad idea. First, he makes a loving couple deal with a marauding Black Bear. Next, he pits a mother and daughter against a playfully bloodthirsty forest spirit. This time out, he’s got three hunters facing down — you guessed it — a hungry pack of vicious wolves. Suffice it to say, if MacDonald suggests a person should join him on a nature hike, I’d suggest politely declining and running like mad straight into the downtown core of the nearest major metropolis.
While I jest, I do think the filmmaker has found his genre niche. He approaches secluded outdoor thrillers with equal parts narrative intelligence and malevolent glee. MacDonald doesn’t waste an audience’s time. But he also doesn’t push the pace so much that events become an unintelligible mishmash of poorly fleshed-out ideas and even more ineptly realized human components. He puts his characters first and ensures that their issues have emotional significance, ultimately waiting to throw a seemingly unstoppable danger into the mix until interpersonal connections have been made and the full magnitude of a poor decision can carry its maximum weight.
This is certainly the case with Out Come the Wolves. At a brisk 87 minutes, MacDonald wastes zero time introducing his principles, retired expert hunter Sophie (Missy Peregrym), her writer fiancé Nolan (Damon Runyan), and her towering lumberjack of a best friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky). Nolan is researching a feature on hunting, and he wants someone to teach him the basics. Sophie brings in Kyle to do the honors as she has become a vegetarian and now only shoots her bow for recreational target practice.
In quick succession, MacDonald fleshes out that Kyle is going through a rough patch and still has an unspoken crush on Sophie. Meanwhile, while Nolan is excited about finally meeting Kyle, he’s not altogether happy Sophie isn’t the one taking him out into the forest to show him the ropes. Other issues also bubble to the surface, all of which create a suitable melodramatic foundation everything else that transpires for this trio will be built.
And then out come the wolves…
That’s pretty much it and I think that’s great. No saving the world. No massive overarching message. No meditations on grief or anything of the like. Just everyday people with normal problems trying to figure out how to work them out who suddenly encounter a pack of hungry wolves. Flesh gets chewed. Arrows fly. Guns are shot. Everyone does what they can to survive, and some unsurprisingly have more success on that front than others do.
This does mean things can feel slight, but I do think that’s intentional. MacDonald doesn’t exactly let his characters ruminate on their situation the same way he did in Backcountry (which also featured Peregrym), and as such the suddenness of the ending is admittedly jarring. This is one of those thrillers that, when it ends, it’s very easy to sit up straight and noisily exclaim, “That’s it?” It’s what I did.
And that’s fine. The idea is that, as much as we as humans like to think we control our lives, the truth is that unforeseen events can change things in ways no one could ever see coming. Sophie doesn’t want to hunt anymore, but to save those she loves the most it’s imperative she grabs her gloves and picks back up her bow. Nolan and Kyle have their own individual epiphanies, and whether or not they can put into practice what they’ve learned during their hunt is entirely dependent on not getting eaten for supper by those darned wolves.
Maybe that’s too complex. It could be that MacDonald only wants to reiterate that going into the woods — for whatever reason — can be fricking scary. Danger does lurk around every tree. The hunter can become the hunted. No matter how prepared or experienced a person thinks they are, Nature can (and oftentimes will) find a way to humble them. While wolf attacks are typically metaphorical, sometimes they are all too literal. In Out Come the Wolves, that’s precisely the case, and, if they live, Sophie, Nolan, and Kyle will have the horrific scars proving just that.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
