OUT COME THE WOLVES Trailer (2024) Missy Peregrym, Thriller Movie

OUT COME THE WOLVES Trailer (2024) Missy Peregrym, Thriller Movie

OUT COME THE WOLVES Trailer (2024) Missy Peregrym, Thriller Movie
© 2024 - IFC Films
"There haven't been wolves in this area for years!" IFC Films + Shudder have unveiled an official trailer for an indie horror thriller titled Out Come the Wolves, the latest horror from filmmaker Adam MacDonald (of Backcountry and Pyewacket). This intense Canadian survival thriller set in the backwoods is about a woman who must fight two kinds of wolves - animals living in nature, and jealous human males. 🐺 Watch out. At a remote cabin deep in the wilderness, a weekend of hunting with three people turns to mayhem and a fight for survival when a pack of wolves suddenly attack a man, his best friend, and her fiance. "Sophie is forced to rely on her hunting prowess to face the deadly predators and save the one closest to her heart." Of course. Starring Missy Peregrym as Sophie, Joris Jarsky and Damon Runyan. I thought we'd moved on from using wolves as the villains in survival movies, but I guess they're a metaphor this time. Just makes me want to (re)watch that Liam Neeson survival movie The Grey instead, in which he also fights off wolves.

Here's the red band trailer (+ poster) for Adam MacDonald's Out Come the Wolves, on IFC's YouTube:

Out Come the Wolves Poster

Retired hunter Sophie (Missy Peregrym) 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 & teach her fiancé Nolan how to hunt for an article he's writing and reveal their engagement. Tensions flare between Kyle & 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. Out Come the Wolves is directed by Canadian indie writer / filmmaker Adam MacDonald, director of the films Backcountry and Pyewacket previously, plus a few other horror short films. The screenplay is written by Enuka Okuma; from a story by Joris Jarsky & Adam MacDonald, and Enuka Okuma. This hasn't premiered at any film festivals or elsewhere, as far as we know. IFC Films debuts Out Come the Wolves in select US theaters + on VOD starting on August 30th, 2024 right at the end of the month. Look any good?
There are few things a microbudget Canadian thriller director loves more than a judiciously-placed woodland setting. That’s certainly true of actor-director Adam MacDonald, who previously crafted wilderness chillers “Backcountry” and “Pyewacket,” both of which use Canada’s voluminous forests to spine-tingling effect. In his latest, “Out Come the Wolves,” he dips back into the woodsy well for another tale of human conflict reflected in the chaos of Mother Nature. Shame, then, that the skimpy structure leaves little to feast on; it’s a bit too gamey for its own good.

Like “Backcountry” before it, “Wolves” centers on a city-fied Canadian Couple, Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and Nolan (Damon Runyon), who retreat to the woods so that Nolan, a food writer, can work on a story about hunting to reconnect to the food we eat. So naturally, they call on Sophie’s old friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky), an avid hunter, to stay with them, and show Nolan the ropes. From frame one, it’s clear Kyle still carries a torch for Soph, and he rather suspiciously waits to announce that his girlfriend couldn’t make it last minute. So it’s just the three of them, throwing back beers and tossing charged asides about their checkered pasts. You see, Kyle and Sophie slept together once, and Nolan can tell Kyle’s still not over it, especially after he bristles at the news that the pair are now engaged. So all of Kyle’s gruff instruction about how to handle a gun or a bow and arrow carry an additional threat. (In one particularly on-the-nose move among many, all of the vanes on Kyle’s arrows read “killer” in another language.) Sophie is oblivious: “This could be the beginning of a beautiful bromance,” she soothes Nolan.

But said bromance goes south quickly when, during their big hunt the next day, the pair run into a ravenous wolf who makes mincemeat of Nolan’s fleshy bits. Kyle manages to fight it off, but in a moment of mixed panic and selfishness, chooses to leave a bleeding Nolan behind to die. It feels like the kind of moral dilemma that should fuel a more interesting backwoods thriller, where Sophie would fight off the advances of a covetous, murderous ex. Instead, the pair bicker a bit, but then jet back off into the woods to find Nolan, only to run into the same wolves who seem to have a taste for Canuck blood.

If this still sounds suspiciously like “Backcountry,” you’re not hallucinating. “Wolves” feels like an unabashed remake of his prior film, from the character dynamics to the man-vs-beast struggle it becomes in the back half (in the prior film, the offending animal was a bear). It even shares some of the prior film’s cast: Peregrym played the girlfriend last time. On a baseline level, it’s effective; you can feel MacDonald making the most of a strained budget, though the over-saturated photography leans a bit too hard on intense close-ups and shaky camera movements. (Killer gore effects, though, especially as the maulings get worse.)

But, shockingly, the front half with the humans is better than the warmed-over rehash of “The Grey” we get in the final 45 minutes. The performances are strong, but workmanlike; still, the actors chew into it with some relish, between Peregrym’s Hilary Swank-like elan and Runyon carrying himself with the smarmy sincerity of Rob Heubel taking a dramatic role. It’s Jarsky who feels like the weak link, though; where Kyle feels written to be menacing, Jarsky comes across as too much of a sad sack to be threatening. He hardly gets any time to let Kyle wrestle with the implications of his inaction in the middle stretch before MacDonald is racing to get to the gnarly, teeth-gnashing set pieces in the sub-90-minute runtime.

Still, maybe that’s the product of the vestigial expectations the first half of “Wolves” engenders in the viewer. There’s something to be said for pulling the rug out from under your audience: “Out Come the Wolves” teases out a murder-in-the-woods psychodrama, only to sic some sick puppies on our blood-filled heroes for some good, old-fashioned “The Edge”-style mayhem. Sadly, MacDonald coasts a bit through the survival horror parts, and the confusing geography of the woods makes all the zipping around on 4x4s and motocross bikes feel somewhat purposeless. Individual sequences pop, and MacDonald knows how to effectively stage the tension of standing silent and hoping your next, agonizing movement won’t be your last.

As the saying goes, inside of me are two wolves: one wishes “Out Come the Wolves” dared to explore the wounded masculinity and murderous love triangle of its first half, while the other wonders if that’d be any better or more interesting than the bone-cracking, arrow-shooting carnage of its second. Either way, I’m thinking MacDonald may want to finally venture out of the forest for his next work. The well may have run dry here.

Currently streaming on Shudder.
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.

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Movies‘Presence’ Teaser Highlights Unconventional Haunted House StoryPublished 2 mins ago on September 12, 2024By Meagan Navarro Presence Review
Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence has been acquired by NEON, giving a new spin on the haunted house format. A new teaser unveiled this morning highlights the setting, further establishing the unconventional haunting ahead.

Presence releases theatrically in select cities on January 17, 2025.

Check out the official teaser trailer for Presence below.

I wrote in my review out of Sundance, “Soderbergh reunites with Kimi screenwriter David Koepp (Stir of Echoes) to give an innovative new spin on the quintessential ghost story. Presence frames its haunted events entirely from the perspective of its ghost. From the opening frame until the end credits, audiences see the thrilling story unfold through chilling narrative twists via Soderbergh’s experimentation with form and technique. Using the camera’s gaze as the ghost’s observing eyes isn’t the only trick up Soderbergh and Koepp’s sleeves, ensuring this exciting shakeup of the haunted house keeps you guessing.”

“Presence gives a contemporary, innovative new spin on the haunted house format that bypasses the well-trodden path to instead create scares of a different nature,” Meagan’s review continues. “Combined with Koepp’s twisty script, Presence pulls you in, terrifies you, then leaves your heart on the floor. This ghost story doesn’t scare in the conventional sense, but it’s an innovative and grim nail-biter with more on its mind than the logline suggests.”

The logline, you ask? Here it is:

“In Presence, a family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they are not alone. A supernatural force has infiltrated the house, and taken a specific interest in the couple’s daughter.

Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Julia Fox, Eddy Maday and West Mulholland star.

Expect to see and hear a lot more about Soderbergh’s latest in the coming months. Watch the teaser below and stay tuned.