COYOTES - Mark Reviews Movies

Coyotes, Aura Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2025

Something akin to the scenario of Coyotes is probably inevitable at this point, but apart from mentioning an increase in wildfires and the inherent suggestion of the obvious climate-related cause behind them, the filmmakers aren't really interested in such matters. It's tough to tell what they care about at all, in fact, except for the basics of this conceit, in which a pack of coyotes arrive in the Hollywood Hills and start killing people.

Director Colin Minihan attempts to inject some humor into this straightforward horror offering, for sure, but even that feels like a bare-minimum level of effort. We meet some eccentric characters or, in the case of the de facto protagonist of the story, one who isn't exactly physically or strategically capable of handling a life-or-death situation like the one in which he finds himself and his family. Every eccentricity, though, simply exists as an idea, and our essentially hapless hero has, maybe, one amusing scene that directly plays on that concept.

Otherwise, we're just watching a bunch of characters, who sometimes aren't smart enough to close the door when a group of wild and homicidal animals are right outside, get attacked by coyotes. That the canines don't look quite right (There's no clear evidence AI was used in their creation, but they look the part at times) and can appear out of nowhere without warning doesn't make for a particularly convincing exercise in terror, either.

The hesitancy on the part of screenwriters Ted Daggerhart and Nick Simon to doing anything different is obvious from the requisite horror-movie prologue. We meet a random, ditzy blonde social media personality (played by Katherine McNamara) who's walking her little dog in the middle of the night. The whole sequence can't decide if it's trying to meet or subvert expectations for what's going to happen in a movie about ferocious coyotes.

The obvious outcome, of course, would be for the dog to be killed, while the more-unexpected turn would be for its to be spared and its owner to meet her end. One could call how the scene plays out a surprise, but that's mainly because the filmmakers take an extra and extraneous step or two to arrive at the most predictable result possible.

The whole movie ends up playing that way. The focal point is a family of three living in an expensive Los Angeles house in the hills. Scott (Justin Long) is a successful writer of graphic novels, currently obsessed with completing his next one. His wife Liv (Kate Bosworth) and their teenage daughter Chloe (Mila Harris) don't see much of him, even though he works from home, and they're starting to resent it just enough for some pre-carnage tension.

The coyotes show up relatively quickly—howling and yipping in the near distance, scurrying around the property, growling at anyone who comes to face-to-face with one of them. In the night, a violent storm knocks down a tree in the family's yard and knocks out the power to the neighborhood, and by the morning, Scott, Liv, and Chloe have seen several signs that coyotes are prowling the area.

All of this, of course, is just setup for assorted characters to be picked off by the canines. Some of them, such as Scott's friend Tony (Kevin Glynn) and the friend's wife (played by Norma Nivia), don't last long enough to get any idea of them (except that the other married couple have different accents and an unhealthy relationship). They exist to further prove what the introduction already has—that the coyotes will kill humans, ripping at ankles or limbs or shoulders with pointy teeth. The death of the friend's wife, by the way, adds the strange detail that she accidentally immolates herself but doesn't take advantage of the pool about a foot away from her. Is that a joke about her intelligence or something else?

With them out of the way, the movie needs more characters to fight and/or be killed by the coyotes, since the main family clearly will be safe for at least quite a while in such a safe, straightforward movie such as this one. We get the trio's weird neighbor Trip (Norbert Leo Butz), who takes a lot of drugs and owns several guns and becomes despondent over the apparent death of his cat, and the sex worker he has hired for the night. She's Julie (Brittany Allen), whose defining characteristic is that she's all about self-preservation—unless that trat comes into conflict with, say, a running joke about how squeamish Scott is at the sight of blood. For whatever reason, the sight of someone gnawed by coyotes to the point that the person's internal organs are exposed, though, doesn't trigger him to faint in way a minor bite does.

Since the movie does have a sense of humor—as underutilized as it may be when it comes to many things, including an odd exterminator (played by Keir O'Donnell) whose reappearance is completely anticlimactic—about itself, it's not worth harping too much on these various inconsistencies. Coyotes does what it sets out to do but also does so blandly, generically, and with only some flashes of personality.

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