The return of Colin Minihan to Austin was met with curiosity and anticipation. Filmgoers still remember the shock and intensity of his 2018 feature What Keeps You Alive, which turned heads at SXSW and lingered in genre conversations long after. That psychological thriller, steeped in atmosphere and anchored by its unsettling intimacy, convinced many that Minihan had his finger firmly on the pulse of suspense. Seven years later, with Coyotes, he comes to Fantastic Fest with another survival nightmare, one couched in modern ecological anxieties and suburban unease.
At first glance, Coyotes appears poised to be one of the more intriguing narratives of the year. It stars Justin Long and Kate Bosworth, real-life partners whose chemistry has often translated well to screen. It also toys with a premise ripped straight from the uncomfortable realities of Southern California life: encroaching wildlife forced into neighborhoods by worsening wildfires. The idea itself is terrifying. Take an ordinary family, place them in a home in the Hollywood Hills, surround them with advancing flames and a pack of bloodthirsty predators, and watch how they survive the longest night of their lives. On paper it sounds lean and devastating. Yet the reality is more complicated. What unfolds is an uneven horror-thriller that frequently struggles to locate the tonal center of its own narrative.
The Opening and a Shift Toward Unease
The first sequence sets a mood that wavers between dark comedy and horror. A young woman, made up like any sun-soaked Californian, loses her tiny dog to coyotes in an abrupt act of violence. Almost instantly, she too becomes a victim. This early jolt is effective, especially since it sketches the unpredictable brutality of nature in confrontation with casual urban existence. But the impact is quickly compromised by choices in presentation. Character names flash onto the screen in flamboyant fonts, a device usually reserved for comic book movies or films with ironic humor. It is attention-grabbing but unnecessary, pulling attention away from the tension of the moment.
Throughout the first act, Minihan and his co-writers Ted Daggerhart and Nick Simon seem uncertain about whether to contrive a bleak and harrowing tale of survival or a broad satire about Hollywood absurdity. The exterminator character employed by Scott, played by Keir O’Donnell, stumbles into the narrative as a caricature of obsessive oddballs. His eccentric behavior shifts emphasis from mounting dread to quirky amusement. A serious thriller can employ humor, but the jokes must feel seamless. Here they jut against the tension, preventing scenes from settling into a rhythm.
The Family Under Siege
At the center of the story is Scott, played by Justin Long. He lives with his wife Liv, portrayed by Kate Bosworth, and their daughter Chloe, brought to life by young actress Mila Harris. Domestic fractures are gently suggested: this is a marriage that has seen better days. Familiar genre tropes surface, the frayed bonds of family providing the subtext for the set pieces. Horror has long been a mirror to domestic discontent, and Minihan aims to draw on that tradition.
When the coyotes begin circling and the wildfire creeps closer, Scott must confront his own inadequacies. He transforms from a somewhat ineffective husband into a man thrust unwillingly into heroism. Long, a performer who can juggle humor and sincerity with ease, grounds the film in ways that the uneven writing cannot fully manage. His chemistry with Bosworth provides cohesion in the midst of chaos. Their real-life connection makes the peril feel slightly more palpable, an authenticity that anchors the viewer even when the story falters.
Neighbors, Outsiders, and Victims
The survival narrative is punctuated with secondary characters who provide fodder for the predators. Scott’s neighbor, Trip, played by Norbert Leo Butz, enters the story like a balloon at the wrong party. Loud and gaudy, his personality veers into parody. With him is Julie, a sex worker portrayed by Brittany Allen. Unlike Trip, Julie is afforded subtler shades, her interactions carrying some measure of gravity. But Trip feels designed to collapse in the most gruesome way possible, and he never connects naturally with the main family. The disjointedness of secondary characters underscores the larger issue of tone.
A film like this thrives on coherence. When outside figures enter, they should either expand thematic meaning or deepen the sense of danger. In Coyotes, they feel like leftovers from a different script, one more interested in lampooning Hollywood eccentricities than tightening the screw of suspense.
Performances as Saving Graces
Despite these flaws, performances keep much of the experience afloat. Justin Long plays Scott as an anxious man who becomes resourceful through necessity. His evolution is not revolutionary, but it is believable. Kate Bosworth carries Liv with quiet resilience. She provides grounding, even when the dialogue falters. Their daughter Chloe, played convincingly by Mila Harris, holds her own in the scenes of peril, avoiding the shrillness that sometimes burdens child roles in thrillers. This central trio provides the human anchor. Without them, the film might collapse under the weight of its own uneven mechanics.
The Problem of the Coyotes
Ultimately, any creature feature will be judged on the strength of its monsters. In this regard, Coyotes struggles. The predators do not resemble the feral, menacing animals of imagined nightmares. Instead, they appear oddly weightless, computer-generated entities that never inhabit the same physical space as the human actors. Their movement is jerky, their eyes glassy, their reactions inconsistent. They rarely convey the ferocity or instinctual menace of actual animals.
The suspicion that the coyotes were crafted by artificial intelligence software has only added to the conversation. Even before release, online discussions speculated that the animals looked like AI-created approximations, not digital effects constructed with cinematic care. The filmmakers have not confirmed whether AI tools were used, but whether true or not, the perception alone speaks volumes. Monsters in survival cinema must feel present, like looming threats. If the audience senses a lack of physicality, the entire illusion dissolves.
The failure of the coyotes undermines suspense. Survival thrillers rely heavily on the credibility of what the characters are escaping. If the predators look manufactured, viewers will disconnect. With Coyotes, that disconnection is constant, and it drains much of the film’s tension.
Contrast With Minihan’s Earlier Work
Considering Minihan’s body of work, Coyotes emerges as puzzling. In What Keeps You Alive, he transformed an intimate love story into a descent into paranoia and betrayal. That film thrived because the danger was believable, chilling, and symbolically loaded. The simplicity worked and anchored the story in psychological truth. With Coyotes, scope is bigger, effects heavier, but subtlety disappears. The results are mixed at best.
Yet traces of his earlier strength peek through. Tension occasionally ignites between Scott and Liv, their fractured union providing authenticity. Minihan is capable of extracting performances that carve genuine stakes. But the intrusion of incongruous humor, wobbly visual effects, and tonal indecision prevents Coyotes from achieving similar heights.
Nature Versus Humanity and the Wider Trend
It is not coincidental that Coyotes joins a string of “man confronting beast” narratives in the year of its release. Fantastic Fest introduced other entries: Primate, a tale of a killer chimp, and Beast of War, about a giant great white shark. In cultural terms, there appears to be renewed obsession with humanity’s confrontation with animals or nature itself. Perhaps it is a reaction to real-world conditions, where climate crises force wild animals into human spaces with increasing frequency. The encroachment of nature into suburban and urban landscapes creates a horror that blurs the line between real fear and metaphor.
Coyotes positions itself in this lineage, highlighting how wildfires displace predators into residential areas. This premise could resonate powerfully. It reflects genuine anxieties felt by Californians, living under annual fire seasons that reshape their relationship with land and safety. Yet where the premise holds relevance, its execution falls short. Instead of channeling dread into narrative focus, the film diverts energy into humor and spectacle. The thematic potential gets lost.
Memorable Moments Amid Missed Opportunities
Still, Coyotes is not devoid of impact. A handful of sequences carry swift brutality and spark visceral reaction. Deaths are staged with creativity, blending gore with timing to shock the audience. At its peak, the film recalls classic survival thrillers where the randomness of death lurks at every frame. Viewers invested enough to forgive the digital shortcomings may still find suspenseful moments to latch onto.
The film is not a disaster. It is instead a missed opportunity. Beneath its flaws resides a lean and terrifying concept, one that could have echoed the chilling realism of recent eco-thrillers. If the coyotes had been designed convincingly, if tonal choices had been reined in, if humor had blended instead of clashed, Minihan may have crafted something extraordinary. Instead, what remains is a film that oscillates between promise and frustration, never fully committing to what it wants to be.
The Verdict on “Coyotes”
In survival cinema, certain fundamentals must be executed with ruthless precision. The premise must be believable, the predators must be frightening, and the characters must be convincing enough to keep audiences invested. Coyotes manages only fragments of these elements. Its human performances lift it. Its premise reflects real anxieties of climate crisis. Its predator, however, never feels like a predator.
Colin Minihan is a filmmaker of ambition, unafraid to shift genres and experiment with structure. His past films confirm his capability for taut, unnerving storytelling. Yet Coyotes showcases the pitfalls of aiming for tone without securing foundation. As a result, the film is less a train wreck than an experiment that slips from its own grip.
Audiences leaving the theater may remember certain scenes, certain performances, perhaps even the earnestness of its central family. But they may also recall laughter between friends as they discussed “fake-otes” that never convinced. In horror, disbelief is death. And disbelief creeps all too easily into Coyotes.
