Director: David Hackl
84 minutes (15) 2019
Dazzler DVD
Rating: 6/10
Review by Donald Morefield
Something
like “I’ve come for my boy” has become a clichéd line from revenge-westerns,
but for this crime thriller of a kidnapping plot, its family-rescue drama turns
into a brutal manhunt, as Daughter Of
The Wolf concerns several gritty confrontations, between the mother and the
kidnappers of her son, where basic humanity is eclipsed by animal rages. Vigilante
heroine Clair (Gina Carano) meets the balaclava henchmen, to deliver a ransom
payment, but this handover of cash is jinxed by their double-cross, so a car chase
and an inevitable road crash are the result of a botched solution to the
crisis.
Stroppy
teen son Charlie is rather more than simply a helpless pawn moving through this
sinister game of one-upmanship. Not just another skinny blonde action star, former
MMA champion Gina ‘Crush’ Carano successfully beats up bad-guys more
convincingly than any of today’s athletes turned actresses. Her fighting
opponents here include thug turned anti-hero Larsen (Brendan Fehr), and the rather more credibly dangerous Hobbs (Sydelle Noel). Primary antagonist Father (Hollywood
superstar Richard Dreyfuss) delivers his brimstone rants with aplomb.
Film-maker David Hackl is clearly no stranger to horror stories about humans or animals, since he made sequel Saw V (2008), in that popular genre franchise, and Into The Grizzly Maze (2015). This often spectacular movie skilfully conjures a malevolent atmosphere for location work on chilly mountainside terrain, especially in grisly scenes of typically poetic justice. These are cleverly structured to involve a pack of wolves in Clair’s hunting scenes and so frequent blood-in-the-snow images on widescreen landscapes punctuate this grim fairy-tale, shot with startling colour and motion, despite its general stillness in the frozen forests.
Although this picture never matches the dramatic intensities of Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017), there are obviously lower-budget similarities here - as bitter and twisted, or bruised and battered, people explore human darkness in a world that’s mostly whiteness.
