MEADOWLARKS (Canada 2025) **
Directed by Tasha Hubbard
MEADOWLARKS is based on director Hubbard’s 2017 documentary Birth of a Family. Director Hubbard’s Meadowlarks is an emotional, fictionalised true drama that follows four siblings, separated by the Sixties Scoop, as they come together over a week. Sixties Scoop refers to the term given for the then-common practice of removing Indigenous children from their families, often without consent, and placing them with the child welfare system. There are no fewer than 3 Canadian films dealing with his topic at TIFF this year. Instead of dealing of issues like how the siblings got to each other and reunite, how they got taken away, director Hubbard concentrates more on awkward small talk, gifts, and forced bonding events, the one brother and three sisters do their best to get to know one another after decades apart, their interactions, and how they come to terms with one another. Unfortunately, Hubbard stays on melodrama and emotional theatrics to tell her story, resulting in forced sentiment and overlong hugging and screaming sessions that go on with dysfunctional families that one has already seen too much of. The audience is also forced to sit through one of the siblings, Justine’s full rendition of her ‘throat singing’.
SAVAGE HUNT (USA 2025) **
Directed by Roel Reiné
SAVAGE HUNT is a savage man versus beast thriller (touted as a survival thriller) from celebrated Dutch action filmmaker Roel Reiné, who also did the music of the film.
Driven by what the press notes call edge-of-your-seat suspense, tension, and primal stakes, SAVAGE HUNT follows a vengeful tracker who is brought in to hunt down a large grizzly bear that had begun attacking humans when a new local resort is being built.
The film’s touted to include scenes with a real grizzly bear. But the bear is not in all the scenes, with some computer-generated or animated, and the attacks often look quite tacky. In Hitchcock’s thriller, THE BIRDS, and in Spielberg’s JAWS, the first scene of a bird and of the shark only appears halfway through the movies, thus generating much audience anticipation. In SAVAGE HUNT, the bear is seen in the first scene and again in too many scenes that the bear looks too cartoonish in parts. But worse of all is the film’s continuity, not helped by the editing, which is really bad. Often, the audience sees the bear attacking a human on the ground and then sees it standing upright, roaring, and then rolling again on the ground. The bear attack scenes are shot with different camera angles of attack, which look disjointed.
The story takes place in the Montana wilderness, where the construction of a new resort and logging operations disrupt the natural habitat. There are some beautiful shots of the Montana landscape, including the rivers, mountains, and wilderness, making Montana look like a tourist spot to visit. But as modernization comes to the wild, the film’s premise proposes that the wild animals have nowhere to survive and therefore move closer to the towns. Such is the main grizzly bear in the film, which is described as the grizzly of grizzlies. If you think that this kind of bear that would eat scraps out of trash cans, this one would eat these grizzlies. T segments of the bear mauling her victims are not that frightening, and in fact, it looks kind of fake, though the aftermath of the mauling is shown in nasty detail to make the film’s point.
The film’s main character is Joe Regan, a hardened tracker and skillful hunter with a troubled past, who hunts down the bear. He has lost his son and his marriage as a result. Other characters include a resort construction chief with his estranged ex-wife and daughter, whom he is trying to communicate with. All these characters are essentially time fillers in a film with a thin narrative.
The film suffers from poorly executed action set pieces, though touted that a real grizzly was brought into the filming. The continuity is much worse, and coupled with a cliched story of relationship-troubled characters, SAVAGE HUNT fails to entertain in more ways than one.
SAVAGE HUNT arrives on digital download and on-demand December 2, 2025, from Shout! Studios, a Radial Entertainment Company.
Trailer:
