“Nature has a way of showing you who you really are.” That’s Sophie (Missy Peregrym) explaining her late father’s philosophy in the gory forest thriller Out Come the Wolves—and dad was right. Though the movie’s title tells you exactly what happens, director Adam MacDonald, who’s made a cottage industry out of what’s out in the woods tonight, keeps you interested in the fate of three characters whose true nature seems elusive—until they face themselves in the woods.
The setup is straightforward, until it’s not. After a pre-credit sequence that shows an injured figure likely trying to get away from the eponymous pack, we meet Kyle (Joris Jarsky, who co-wrote the story with MacDonald and screenwriter Enuka Okuma). He’s on his ATV ready to meet Sophie and Nolan (Damon Runyan—really) for a getaway-cum-assignment. You see, Nolan is a food writer and editor who’s working on a piece in which, as he puts it, “I’ll see what it takes to put that meat on my plate,” and Sophie thought Kyle would be the perfect person to take this city boy hunting for the first time.
You may be wondering about the relationships here, which are clearly fraught even if you’re not sure how. Okuma’s script shies away from easy exposition, so you’re kept wondering who these people are: when Kyle and Sophie talk about how her father taught them how to hunt when they were kids, you assume they’re brother and sister. But they’re actually childhood friends, with little romantic history. Over some expensive cognac, Nolan tries to tease out the nature of Kyle’s relationship with Sophie, who has apparently failed to tell Kyle that she’s engaged to Nolan. And that’s not the only secret Sophie has kept from her childhood friend.
So the relationship diagram is fuzzy, but even so, the opposing types are obvious: Nolan is kind of a metrosexual intellectual, while Sophie and Kyle grew up knowing how to kill and fend for themselves. On the other hand, Sophie has had a recent change of heart about hunting and has become vegan, which Kyle dismisses as absurd.
Tense relationships; guns and bows and arrows; a cabin getaway. What could possibly go wrong? And since Sophie seems perfectly at home in the woods, why did she enlist Kyle to take her fiancée on his first expedition?
The set-up and body count is curiously similar to the recent creature feature Consumed, which also pits two men and a woman against danger among the trees. And like Consumed, what Out Come the Wolves excels in is its relationships. The three characters could be figures in a taut stage drama, if there were only some way to bring a wolf pack into the round.
The wolves are the reason this movie exists, but it’s more than just a well-considered rumination about man and nature. This is more Pinter than Herzog, and watching the actors navigate this primeval drama is if anything more of a thrill than the dog-and-mouse game they’re playing.
It’s fascinating too that the man of letters is played by an actor who takes his name from a writer known for creating a demimonde filled with tough guys. Nolan is no tough guy, and in the end, we learn that maybe Kyle isn’t either. So it’s left to Sophie to pick up after the ineffectual men around her, and Peregrym, as she did in MacDonald’s similarly themed Backcountry, carries the proceedings with completely convincing authority. Out Come the Wolves asks city slickers and country folk the same question: do you have what it takes to survive?
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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