Coyotes, from Colin Minihan (writer and director of the excellent What Keeps You Alive), is a silly, entertaining comic thriller about a Studio City family trapped in their house by a pack of coyotes that comes looking to, well, eat them.
Justin Long stars as Scott, a workaholic graphic novel artist who’s holed up working in his beautiful, Hollywood Hills home. His wife, Liv, played by his real-life wife Kate Bosworth, loves him but is clearly worn out by his manic energy and constant work distractions. Their daughter Chloe (Mila Harris) is a textbook disaffected teen whose main character trait is thinking her parents are cringe.
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The trouble starts after a visit from Devon, an exterminator played with over-the-top weirdness by Keir O’Donnell, with some fantastical ideas about the motivations of critters. Already spooked by the idea of rats, Scott is pushed further over the edge when a windstorm topples a tree in their yard – something he’s been putting off fixing. Buried in the wreckage is a bloody cat collar belonging to the cat of their booze-loving, drug-doing neighbor Trip (Norbert Leo Butz). He’s busy entertaining his “lady friend” Julie (Brittany Allen, who gets some of the movie’s best laughs) when Liv points out that his cat may have met a grisly end. Spoiler: it has, and the culprits are soon revealed to be a pack of hungry California coyotes.
From there, Coyotes is a standard home-invasion thriller, except this time the invaders enter on four-legs. The family is forced to fend off four-legged beasts by any means necessary, punctuated by the occasion, genuine, well-timed wisecrack. The suspense is legit, and you don’t expect to find jump scares, though don’t go looking for deeper themes about survival, relationships, or ecology. This movie has one job: don’t let the coyotes eat the protagonists. And honestly? That’s enough.
Long is his usual charming, nervous, wisecracking self, turning into a semi-action hero along the way. He makes the most of the script by Ted Daggerhart (The Expendables 4) and Nick Simon (The Pyramid), though the dialogue isn’t particularly sharp and the story doesn’t shoot for much beyond “killer mutts.” Bosworth plays the straight role well, occasionally slipping into full-on “get away from her, you bitch” mode, but mostly keeping the family grounded. Allen nearly steals the movie, but she needed sharper lines to push her character into genre-icon territory.
The coyotes are mostly CGI, and while not flawless, the effects do the job. Minihan’s own editing keeps the attacks brisk, the tension mounting, and the gore visceral. There’s also a stylistic flourish where characters are introduced as comic-book drawings; a nod to Scott’s profession that never really pays off or adds much to the film. It feels as though the movie needed to either lean into the comedy or go balls out with the thrills. Somehow, they both get a tad neutered.
In the end, Coyotes is exactly what it sets out to be: a silly, fun creature-feature with enough bite to keep horror-thriller fans entertained. It’s not breaking new ground, but as a casual Friday-night watch, it gets the job done.
Coyotes opens in theaters on October 3, 2025.
