Out Come the Wolves
Most Canadian thriller filmmakers working with a microbudget would probably agree that woods are a good aesthetic. This is undoubtably valid for actor director Adam MacDonald, the creator of Backcountry and Pyewacket, both of which incorporate the Canada’s thick forests in a brilliant manner. In the most recent work entitled Out Come the Wolves, he once again seeks the woodsy well and brings out yet another tale featuring man’s turmoil viewed through the terror of Mother Nature. Well, it is regrettable that exactly the meagre structure provides us very little which one could enjoy. it is rather unflattering gory affair.
Like its predecessor ‘Backcountry’, ‘Wolves’ focuses on the frigid Canadian couple, Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and Nolan (Damon Runyon), who head to the forest to assist Nolan, a food critic by profession, in hunting as part of his story to find the roots of how food is sourced in the society. Naturally, they ask Sophie’s childhood friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky), a seasoned hunter to come over and give Nolan some pointers. From the get go, it is quite evident that Kyle has a thing for Soph and he quite conveniently leaves out that his girlfriend couldn’t come due to a last minute problem. So it is just the three of them, necking beers and exchanging diatribes about their sordid histories. You see, Kyle and Sophie slept together once, and Nolan, who is now busy planning his wedding with Kyle, knows full well that Kyle has not moved on from this episode. And so all of Kyle’s loud shouting about how to aim a gun or a bow and arrows is a threat in disguise. (In one especially irksome in a row of many, all the vanes of Kyle’s arrows had “killer” written in an exotic language.) Sophie doesn’t have a clue: “This could be the start of a fantastic bromance,” she tells Nolan.
Howeer, this supposedly special friendship gets messed up rather quickly with one of the best parts, which is when the two friends come across a vicious wolf the following day on their much anticipated hunt, who devours Nolan’s unprotected flesh. Kyle is able to fend it off, but in some measure of panic and a little bit of selfishness, he opts to leave an injured Nolan and run for the hills. It feels like the kind of conflict that ought to be more interesting and be a thrilling novel set in the backwoods where Sophie would be trying to resist a former partner who was a killer and quite obsessive. Instead, they argue for a while, and simply glance at each other before making their way into the woods to look for Nolan, only to meet the same wolves that were probably waiting for a Canadian to sink their teeth into again.
If this still sounds absurdly similar to “Backcountry,” you’re not imagining things. “Wolves” seems to be sort of a clone of his former movie as well, from the interpersonal relationships of the characters to the man versus wolf war that develops in the second half (the previous film involved, didn’t it, the assault of a bear). It even features some of the cast of the previous film. Peregrym was the girlfriend in the last film. At its most basic level, it achieves its goal, it’s easy to see MacDonald attempting to squeeze whatever he could out of a limited budget, although everything is prone to that over cooked and over saturated photograph dominated by eager cut in shots of trembling hands in motion. (Killer gore effects, though especially when the maulings get progressively worse.)
An even more amazing development is that the earlier part with the human characters is more engrossing than the last 45 minutes, which was merely a tired retread of “The Grey.” The acting is good, however, it’s a bit too engineered all in all; nevertheless, the performers get into it with some enjoyment, for example, Peregrym’s Hilary Swank like charisma and Runyon’s unbearable sincerity as Rob Heubel turned serious. In his performance, however, the weakest actor seems to be Jarsky, Kyle, who is supposed to be the intimidating one, feels like he was created that way, but Jarsky does not feel like a person who would be intimidating in any circumstance and comes across as too pathetic.
Kyle isn’t even given the chance to contemplate the implications of his inactivity in the middle stretch, as MacDonald almost immediately dashes for the painfully brutal, teeth-clenching set pieces during the short runtime of less than 90 minutes.
Perhaps that is the reason for the residual hopes that the first half ‘Wolves’ nurtures in the spectators. There’s also a case to be made about turning things on their head in this manner when it comes to the sort of audience who consumes your media “Out Come the Wolves” sets itself up as a marriage of murder in the woods psychodrama and sick puppies (accurate) pummelling our gore drenched protagonists for some proper The Edge hullabaloo. Unfortunately MacDonald seems to take it easy during the survival horror scenes for which the environmental geography’s confusion makes all the 4×4 and motocross bike zooming seem quite pointless. Some individual sequences do seem to snap MacDonald is also quite effective in telling the audience when the next move would be their last hopefully.
Here, I seem to be contradicting myself. One part of me is holding out hope for the Comeback Wolves second half but another side is eager to see if the later half ever comes. It can never actually be as contrasting as gory blood and arrow massacres of the later half. Its like I am saying to myself what MacDonald might be thinking about the forest. Whenever there are journalists there have to be dislikes as well. I think in this case the well has run dry.
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