Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Colin Minahan
Starring: Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Katherine McNamara, Brittany Allen, Mila Harris, Norbert Leo Butz
Having spent the past three decades watching creature features and asking "why couldn't they have used a real animal instead of CG?" I now find myself asking "why couldn't they have used CG rather than AI?" Colin Minahan's Coyotes is the most extreme case so far of glaringly obvious AI effects in a mainstream production. The titular doggos here are no more convincing than any of the AI slop that now pollutes our social media feeds, and we never believe they're sharing the same physical space as their human co-stars. It's a shame as with 2024's Out Come the Wolves, we've seen how the use of actual animals greatly benefits movies of this ilk.
Distracting AI aside, Coyotes is a reasonably entertaining animal attacks thriller. Its credits sequence utilises real life footage of coyotes intruding on human spaces, something that has become increasingly common in recent years, especially in California, where wild fires have pushed the creatures to the outskirts of towns and cities. If you're a Californian, the premise of Minahan's film will likely channel very real anxieties. You can avoid sharks by simply keeping out of the water, but what happens when coyotes come to your doorstep?
That's just what happens to the family at the centre of Coyotes. Dad Scott (Justin Long), Mum Liv (Kate Bosworth) and their teenage daughter Chloe (Mila Harris) find themselves in a fight for survival when a storm knocks out their power and crushes the family car under a falling tree. As if that wasn't enough, a pack of coyotes have gathered and have been chomping on their neighbours.
Coyotes has fun parodying the sort of people who live in the Hollywood hills. Scott and Liv's next door neighbour Trip (Norbert Leo Butz) is a cokehead who pays sex worker Julie (Brittany Allen) to endure his insufferable company. The other neighbours are a sarcastic Irish immigrant (Kevin Glynn) and his ball-busting Slavic trophy wife (Norma Nivia). Adding to the cast is a deranged exterminator (Keir O'Donnell) Scott initially hires to take care of a potential rodent problem but who later finds himself battling a more formidable menace.
The trouble is Coyotes kills off its supporting characters too early, leaving us with people we know aren't going to get eaten for the remainder of the film. It also suffers from a clunky attempt to add some depth to its main characters. We don't really need to know anything about Coyotes' human protagonists other than their will to survive, but the film insists on trying to inject some human drama with a subplot about Scott being an inattentive father and husband. That would be fine if the movie showed us this organically, but instead it lazily doles out this information via a monologue by Liv, assuming we'll simply take her word for it. The film adds a secondary threat in the form of a fire raging through the neighbourhood, but it never poses any real danger; we're all familiar with how quickly fire spreads, so we simply don't buy that it takes so long for it to make its way from Trip's home to Scott and Liv's.
If you can ignore such issues, there's some fun to be had here for fans of animal attacks fare. While the AI takes us out of the moment whenever we get a close-up look at the coyotes, Minahan does an effective job of staging some suspenseful sequences. There are a couple of nail-bitingly blocked shots that will make you want to scream "look behind you," and when the coyotes are kept out of focus or engulfed in darkness they prove sufficiently threatening.
Real life couple Long and Bosworth have a believable chemistry, and when the latter is scolding the former you can imagine her channelling real life frustration over his habit of leaving the toilet seat up. Allen, who also scored the film, is enjoyably sardonic as the unperturbed sex worker who has seen it all.
Coyotes benefits from a novel setting, engaging leads and some canny direction, but regardless of where you stand on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, its presence here does Minahan's film no favours.
Coyotes is on UK/ROI VOD from December 29th.
