Grizzly Night

The Heavy Cost of a Summer Night

Vacation can bring out a very particular kind of arrogance. We load up the station wagon, head into the deep wild, and somehow expect nature to perform on cue for us. On August 12, 1967, that fantasy was torn apart in Montana’s Glacier National Park, when two fatal grizzly bear attacks happened on the same night, nine miles apart. It was a shocking disaster, and it forced the National Park Service to radically rethink how it dealt with wildlife. Nearly sixty years later, director Burke Doeren tries to compress that long, chaotic night into his first feature, *Grizzly Night*. It’s uneven and sometimes awkward, but it also manages something rare for a modern creature feature. It treats the people, and the animals, with some actual respect.

If you came in expecting the grinning, gore-splashed lunacy of *Cocaine Bear*, this is not that movie. Doeren, working from a script by Katrina Mathewson and Tanner Bean, steers away from exploitation and more or less plants the film in disaster territory. (Think less *Jaws* and more *Everest*.) The tension doesn’t hinge on a CGI beast popping out from behind the trees. It creeps in through administrative failure and human laziness. The real threat isn’t simply the predator at the top of the food chain. It’s the trash overflowing from bins and the complacency that taught wild animals to scavenge where people sleep.



That feeling lands especially well in an early scene at the Granite Park Chalet. Rookie ranger Joan Devereaux (Lauren Call) stands beside a rusted incinerator. The camera, through cinematographers Brian Mitchell and Ian Start, pointedly avoids the dark tree line in favor of the garbage itself: half-eaten hot dogs, foil wrappers, that cloying smell of rot. Joan shifts uneasily, stiff as a board, as the truth dawns on her. They haven’t merely brought visitors into the wilderness. They’ve laid out a feast for enormous scavengers. When the attack finally comes, the movie mostly keeps the violence off-screen. What we get instead is the rip of canvas and the panicked screams echoing through the storm. It’s the right call. The horror feels more real because the focus stays on fear, not spectacle.

That same restraint carries into the performances. Charles Esten plays head ranger Gary Bunney, a man trying to contain a crisis with next to nothing at his disposal. I’m used to seeing Esten work with a certain rugged ease in shows like *Nashville* or *Outer Banks*. Here, that charm is stripped way back. The performance is almost all in the body. His shoulders sag. He keeps rubbing at his temples like he can knead the disaster out of existence. He moves like someone who already knows what’s coming and knows he has no real way to stop it. Call’s Joan gives the film the anxious spark it needs. She doesn’t play the role like an action hero in waiting. She feels like a young woman trying to make impossible decisions in the dark.



I can’t say the film fully holds together. The second act drags badly, bogged down by repetitive exchanges where characters more or less explain the movie to each other. Doeren also has trouble juggling the two separate attack timelines, and the last half hour turns into a hurried push toward the end. With a tighter cut, the film might have kept the suffocating tension it builds so well at the start. How much that matters will probably depend on how much patience you have for procedural indie drama.

Still, there’s a real maturity in where the movie lands. *Film Ireland's* Conor Bryce correctly pointed out that the movie eschews the typical beast-slaying victory lap for a "strangely downbeat climax." Nobody decks a bear and tosses off a clever line. What follows is quiet, ugly, and sad. The next morning, the park rangers go out and kill the food-conditioned bears, and the film offers no triumph in that. The animals are casualties too, just as surely as the young women, played with quiet sincerity by Brec Bassinger and Ali Skovbye, who lost their lives.



*Grizzly Night* probably won’t redefine the survival thriller. It’s a modest, somewhat lopsided film that tries to carry more historical weight than it can always manage gracefully. But the quieter scenes have stayed with me. What lingers is that uneasy reminder that the line between human space and the natural world is never as solid as we pretend. We can build roads, put up chalets, and hand out brochures. None of that means the woods are ours. Sooner or later, they make that plain.