Grizzly Night Review – Animal attack campsite thriller featuring rogue bears and wayward teens | film

DDespite the stark poster art, as a bear rampage film, it’s closer to the serious end of the Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell scale, than Cocaine Bear. Based on a bizarre tragedy in August 1967 in which two women were killed separately by grizzly bears in Montana’s Glacier National Park (described here as a “trillion-to-one” incident), Burke Dorrien’s feature debut is coherent to the teeth, but considerably less certain when it comes to people.

In the park, fire season is everything the rangers think they have on their plate, but they don’t reckon with wayward teenagers and rogue bears. At the gift shop, Michelle (Ali Skovby) leans on Paul (Jacob Buster) to join her group and help her get rid of an unwanted suitor at Trout Lake. So he leaves his colleague Julie (Brec Basinger) for a sexy sojourn with her boyfriend Roy (Matt Lentz) at a separate location. Meanwhile, with smoke columns occupying the guards, rookie Joan (Lauren Cole) is led to lead a tour group headed to a remote inn.

The initial attack – in which Julie and Roy are caught in sleeping bags – conveys with horrific immediacy what it must be like to be at the mercy of a quarter ton of fur and muscle. Doeren also emphasizes the possibility of reality check, using the visitors’ lodge to demonstrate the geography and vulnerability of the neurotic rescue mission – protected only by a fire bucket – to reach the screaming Julie. Doeren animates his quasi-forensic understanding of the predicament through his focus on the injuries sustained: back-of-house doctor John (Oded Fehr) struggles to stop Roy’s bleeding, while it falls to Paul to pick up the pieces at Trout Lake.

Given the stark realism of the heat of the moment, it’s a shame that the creature feature framework isn’t so compelling. Shot in a sunburst look in the streaming era, the 1960s setting feels like a stand-in – and the various teen entanglements that are supposedly there to endear us/make us care are Scooby-Doo-level stuff. Only Joan’s experience of proving herself as a leader carries any emotional or moral weight, though it’s hard to disagree with the recent finger-waving about reasonable conservatism. Doeren clearly has a sense of the bear’s necessities, but human interest barely kicks in.