Out Come the Wolves: A Finely Crafted Woodsy Thriller with a Love Triangle and Lupine Menace

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-minus

Two hunters together in the woods and in love with the same woman is the very definition of means, motive and opportunity.

But Out Come the Wolves director/co-writer Adam MacDonald keeps us guessing until practically the final frame as to how it’s all going to play out in this finely crafted sylvan thriller.

Also, there are wolves.

Kyle (Joris Jarsky) and Nolan (Damon Runyan) put their mutual tension on hold amid howls.

Co-writer Joris Jarsky stars as Kyle, who shows up for a couples’ weekend getaway minus his significant other. “Without his girlfriend, it’s a very different weekend,” is the dark prediction from Nolan (Damon Runyan), whose girlfriend Sophie (Missy Peregrym) is also a childhood friend of Kyle’s. And those two have some rocking chemistry.

MacDonald wastes no time setting up the triangle. Kyle and Sophie are both very outdoorsy, and expert hunters. Nolan is a journalist working on a piece about learning to hunt. Sophie could teach him, but she wants Kyle to do it. And so, after an awkward evening featuring too much wine and whine, the two men head off into the woods to shoot a deer.

When the wolves show up it’s almost a relief, since we’ve been white-knuckling our way through tension you could cut with a knife. And everyone in this movie has a knife.

But Kyle’s reaction to the appearance of the lupine predators is difficult to decipher. Fear, certainly. But does he panic? Or is it something more calculated? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

In addition to working as an actor and TV director — he shot 24 episodes of the series Slasher — MacDonald had made two other feature films, both excellent, both scary, both arboreal. Backcountry (2014) finds a couple (including Peregrym) stalked by a predatory black bear. Pyewacket (2019) is about a mildly Gothy teen who summons a demon and then regrets it.

Out Come the Wolves also features the same cinematographer from those two films, Christian Bielz, who delivers some cool and unsettling angles, often placing the camera a little lower than feels “right,” a couple of times flipping the entire scene on its head.

But if you’re starting to think that MacDonald is just repeating himself, let’s just say that if you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise. 

Out Come the Wolves. Directed by Adam MacDonald. Starring Missy Peregrym, Damon Runyan, and Joris Jorsky. Opens Aug. 30 in cinemas and VOD/digital, and in the U.S. via IFC Films.