There’s a particular subgenre of horror I’ll never outgrow. A narrative kink I fall for every time, the siege film. A structure, any structure becomes a fragile sanctuary, and outside, the menace gathers. It could be masked killers, brain-hungry zombies, extraterrestrials, or the less glamorous but equally destructive forces of nature. The rules are simple. The doors must hold, the barricades must creak, and the characters must slowly unravel as whatever lurks outside sharpens its teeth. Done right, it’s cinematic catnip. Which is why, when I heard about Coyotes, a new film from Colin Minihan, my pulse quickened in anticipation.
The premise has the kind of lurid simplicity that ought to work. Justin Long and Kate Bosworth, real-life spouses, star as a suburban couple with a teenage daughter who find themselves besieged by abnormally vicious coyotes. The animals begin attacking their neighbors, then inevitably circle back to the Long-Bosworth residence, gnashing at doors, pawing at windows, and generally violating the boundaries of modern family life. If nothing else, one expects suspense, primal terror, and bit of fun.
But Coyotes is not content with primal terror. Instead, it is four movies stitched together into one fraying garment, and none of them quite fit. Minihan (best known for Grave Encounters and a string of Theory of a Deadman music videos) directs from a script co-written by three people, one of whom also penned The Expendables 4. That fact is not incidental. It hovers over the film like an omen, whispering, “restraint will not live here.”
The early scenes offer a glimmer of promise. Characters are introduced with bold comic-book fonts emblazoning their names across the screen, a flourish borrowed from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s a gambit that suggests whimsy, perhaps even a meta approach to horror-comedy. But the conceit evaporates almost immediately, giving way to a jittery tonal soup in which Michael Bay explosions, Tarantino banter, and Guy Ritchie jump cuts all compete for attention. Every character seems dosed on cocaine, both literally (the neighbors are cartoonishly drug-riddled) and metaphorically (dialogue is shouted, choices are deranged).
The coyotes themselves, meanwhile, are rendered with CGI that appears to have time-traveled from the Clinton administration. Their movements are stiff, their mouths a blur of pixelated geometry, their menace undone by cheapness. When they leap into action, you don’t scream. You laugh, the way you laugh at an old computer game trying desperately to be cinematic. In a siege film, the monster outside the door must be credible. Here, it might as well be a screensaver.
The film’s energy grows increasingly desperate. Tension never simmers. It only combusts into louder, gaudier absurdities. One sequence finds Justin Long constructing a makeshift cage out of baby furniture, fumbling it, and then, inexplicably, the movie rewinds itself. The scene restarts, heavy-metal music blaring, as Long rebuilds the contraption with slightly more competence. It’s the kind of gimmick that might’ve killed in a Deadpool sequel but here feels like a cry for help. Elsewhere, the neighbors, vibrating with drug-induced mania, shout their way through a subplot so thin it could’ve been written on a cocktail napkin.
And yet, amid the chaos, Long and Bosworth remain oddly charming. Their chemistry is natural, their presence steady, even as the script pelts them with non sequiturs. You sense that they’re having fun on set, at least. Perhaps that’s the only way to survive a movie like this, surrender to its nonsense and hope the audience forgives you.
But the real frustration of Coyotes is the ghost of the movie it could have been. Imagine a lean, stripped-down survival thriller in which a family must endure a night of escalating attacks from real predators, the suspense mounting with every paw against the door. Think Cujo with more legs. Such a film would need no flashy fonts, no Looney Tunes physics, no rewinds or riffs on Quentin Tarantino. It would need only patience, atmosphere, and the slow, delicious tightening of dread.
Instead, Coyotes is a stressed pastiche that never trusts silence, never lingers in fear, and never allows the primal scenario to breathe. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone elbowing you in the ribs every five minutes, insisting you notice how wild and fun they are until, exhausted, you wish only for quiet.
By the time the credits roll, you don’t remember the kills or the scares. You only remember the wasted potential. You remember the coyotes that looked like malfunctioning PlayStation One villains. You remember the baby-furniture cage and the heavy-metal montage. You remember that somewhere out there, a perfectly good siege thriller was left on the table in favor of cocaine-fueled antics.
In the end, Coyotes is a silly, shapeless howl of a movie that needed either Liam Neeson with a hunting knife or a wisecracking Road Runner to redeem it. Absent both, it collapses under its own chaos. A siege film should trap us in suspense, but Coyotes only traps us in noise.
