★★★
Colin Minihan’s creature feature turns animal panic into a siege horror, but it never bites as hard as it promises.
Coyotes begins with promise: prowling animals stalk a loudmouth party girl as she clip-clops through nighttime suburbia with her dog, before first the dog gets it sand then she does. The title card slams onto the screen: COYOTES. So we’re all set for a classic tongue-in-cheek animal attack movie.
Is that what we get? First yes, but then… not really. The opening kills are grisly enough to raise hopes, but they arrive too early. Once the survivors are signposted, the tension leaks away. What should build to hysteria instead collapses like a soufflé.
The Stewarts (Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, and Mila Harris as their daughter) are our family under siege in the Hollywood Hills. Only Trip (Norbert Leo Butz), a producer across the street, and Jules (Brittany Allen), the sex worker he entertains, make an enjoyable cartoonish impression – Long explaining Jules to his daughter as a “lady of the night” is one of the few lines that lands. Elsewhere neighbour Kat (Katherine McNamara), and pest control guy Tony (Kevin Glynn) are sketches, not characters.
Minihan sprinkles stylistic gimmicks: freeze-frames that turn newcomers into Roy Lichtenstein panels, their names emblazoned like Batman fight sounds. On paper it reads as pulpy fun; on screen it grates, slowing the pace and announcing its cleverness.
Long’s comic-book-artist character inhabits a pristine Hollywood Hills modernist house with no visible income. That absurdity could have tipped the film into full farce. Instead, it sits unexamined. The satire of privilege under siege never moves beyond outline.
The production is equally uneven. Some coyotes convince, others look flimsy. Background details falter too: bedroom posters show the tell-tale glitches of generative filler, another cheap shortcut that shreds immersion. A creature feature lives or dies on texture, and here the seams show.
By the close, Coyotes has played it safe. The premise cries out for escalation, for claws and teeth and a tilt into chaos. Minihan settles for competence. What should have been a beer-and-pizza movie winds down into a mug of cocoa: fitfully fun, occasionally sharp, but where it should have been over the top, it’s merely in under the wire.
Coyotes played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX.
Whitlock&Pope 