Fantastic Fest 2025: ‘Coyotes’ Review
Climate change’s impact on Earth has provided plenty of new horrors for mankind to experience, but sometimes wildfires aren’t enough to stoke fear in the hearts of men. It’s not until predators like coyotes start migrating away from the fires and stalking humans for food that the threat becomes real enough to address. Such is the case with the characters at the center of Colin Minihan’s latest film, Coyotes. Starring real-life couple Justin Long and Kate Bosworth as a family whose home in the Hollywood Hills is terrorized by CG canines while the rest of Los Angeles burns around them, Minihan’s latest is a silly horror-thriller that squanders most of its potential in the name of cheap thrills and even cheaper effects.
Long stars as Scott, a comic book artist who is introduced through the handling of a rodent problem in his swanky home. After bringing in an exterminator, Devon (Keir O’Donnell) to help get rid of the rats in the walls, he and his family soon become trapped in their home after a windstorm takes out the power and severely damages their car. Things only get worse for him, his wife, Liv (Bosworth), and their daughter, Chloe (Mila Harris), when the wildfires around LA have pushed feral coyotes into their neck of the woods and begin tearing apart the affluent residents of the Hollywood Hills.
That they are rich is somehow irrelevant to Nick Simon and Tad Daggerhart’s screenplay, even though it goes to great lengths to emphasize that it’s okay for characters to die because they are wealthy—and subsequently, a little dumb. Devon wastes no time expressing his disdain for the upper class when he visits Scott’s home. Still, he himself is seen as uneducated and unruly in ways that paint a larger portrait of the writers’ outlook on humanity as a whole. It’s a very mean-spirited movie, but there’s room for that in horror if it means the kills will be appropriately intense and there’s something poignant to add that justifies the cruelty. Unfortunately, Coyotes never finds those beats.
No one is above being killed, but there still needs to be someone to root for. The film positions plenty of characters as prime coyote bait, such as Trip (Norbert Leo Butz), who is insufferable right from the beginning as he parades around the neighbourhood only to antagonize the audience further. However, no character is particularly interesting, and the film does very little to make Scott and his family endearing besides the innate chemistry between Long and Bosworth. Without that, the film flails around to try and keep its characters locked into their predicament until enough grisly kills have occurred to satisfy the bloodlust of an audience hoping for something gnarly. They do come and are viscerally satisfying, even if there’s not much weight to them. There are no big surprises in Coyotes, but there’s a healthy dose of bloodshed to get you through the tedious screenplay.
The biggest gripe against Coyotes, though, is that they don’t look real. They sometimes even look like they’ve been thrown through an AI-generated filter, specifically with how their fur and eyes seem to move without any justification. It’s all slightly animated, breaking a level of immersion that the movie doesn’t really seem to care too much about to begin with. Graphic novel visuals are filtered over introductions of characters to further distance the audience from any real-life commentary that created the family’s dire circumstances. Everything about Coyotes seems glib and flippant. There’s some fun to be had in a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but there’s also a point at which gesturing towards the world around its audience damns a film from disconnecting itself. Coyotes falls into that exact trap, leaving behind an underwhelming collection of kills and hollow references to reality that are further dampened by disappointing special effects.
The 20th Fantastic Fest took place from September 18th to 25th. Coyotes celebrated its World premiere on September 20th. The full list of films selected for the festival can be found here. Coyotes is now playing in theatres, and will be released digitally across VOD platforms on October 21st.
