Retired hunter Sophie invites her fellow hunter and childhood best friend Kyle to her family’s secluded cabin deep in the woods. There, she plans for Kyle to meet and teach her fiancé Nolan how to hunt for an article he’s writing and to share the news of their engagement. Tensions flare between Kyle and Nolan over their shared history with Sophie, escalating during the hunt that goes awry when they are ambushed by a vicious pack of territorial wolves. As alliances fracture under the pressure of survival, Sophie is forced to rely on her long-abandoned hunting prowess to face the deadly predators and save the one closest to her heart.
What We Thought:
I tend to enjoy man vs. nature/animals movies, but Out Come the Wolves spends too much time on the man part and not enough with the animals. By the time it becomes about the characters trying to fight off the wolves I was kind of bored with it. Those sequences are good, I just wish more time was spent on them and less about the characters’ backstories.
I understand you want the audience to care about the characters and whether or not they survive, but the film spends too much time on the love triangle and not enough in nature. There is one woman who has a new fiancé and another man, a childhood friend, who is secretly in love with her. His relationship recently ended and he was originally supposed to bring his girlfriend. It should have been two couples instead of the awkward love triangle it ends up. I know all this because the majority of the movie is about her, the friend, their friendship, their one night together in the past and her fiancé who is writing an article about hunting. Not all of that is necessary in my book.
The two males eventually head out to hunt and when the friend goes off to kill another deer, a wolf attacks the fiancé. He races back to get help and then she joins in not understanding how he left the other man behind. They split up and it’s wolves vs. people. It’s at least interesting at this point and that should have been the focus of the movie.
This is the second film Missy Peregrym has starred in with the same director that I have seen. I liked Backcountry more than Out Come the Wolves, but if you enjoyed that you’ll probably like this one. It’s not bad exactly, but there could be a lot more going on. It had the potential to be more, but as is I don’t think I’d watch it again.
The Nerds Templar 