Coyotes is a 2026 horror comedy directed and edited by Colin Minihan, written by Tad Daggerhart and Nick Simon, running 91 minutes. It stars Justin Long and Kate Bosworth as Scott and Liv Stewart, a wealthy couple trapped in their Hollywood Hills home with their teenage daughter Chloe, played by Mila Harris, after a Santa Ana windstorm cuts off power and escape routes and drives a pack of unusually aggressive coyotes into the neighbourhood. Brittany Allen, Keir O'Donnell and Katherine McNamara appear in support.

I want to be honest about my immediate reaction, which was to finish the film, sit down at my desk, and stare at my keyboard for a considerable period of time with no idea what I was supposed to write about it.

And I want to be fair, because I have watched genuinely worse films this year, and plenty of them. So can I claim this was especially terrible? Not really. But was any part of it actually good? Also no. It simply exists, inoffensively, for ninety-one minutes, and then stops.

The thing I cannot get past is the coyotes, which is a significant problem in a film called Coyotes. Every single time one appeared on screen I visibly cringed, because they look dreadful. My exact reaction, more than once, was to wonder what in the AI generated coyotes I was looking at.

Having since read around, I can report that I am very much not alone. One critic wrote that there was something about the lighting and the design of the creatures that looks like AI, which is close to a direct match for my own reaction. Another described the effects as fluctuating wildly, with bodies that move convincingly while the animated faces look video-game cheap, and sequences where the animals are almost photorealistic except for cartoonishly enhanced mouths. There is no consistency to it, which means you never settle into the illusion for more than a few seconds at a time.

There is also a coincidence here that genuinely improved my day. A couple of weeks ago I reviewed Coyote vs. Acme and awarded it a nine. So within a single month I have now reviewed two films centred on coyotes, and the one featuring a hand-drawn cartoon character from the 1940s had vastly superior animation to the one attempting photoreal predators in 2026.

Justin Long does exactly what Justin Long does, which is to be nervous, funny and slightly hopeless, and he is reliably watchable at it. He has built a second career out of this specific register in horror films and it serves him well here. The rest of the cast got paid. There is one detail I enjoyed, which is that Long and Kate Bosworth are a real-life couple, and Variety ran a piece in which they explained that their greatest difficulty on set was trying not to appear too romantic with one another, given they were meant to be playing a strained marriage. That is a charming problem to be managing while being pursued by wildlife.