Sound on. Headphones, if you have them.
While the real-estate developer fights to keep the lifts open, a Chicago novelist, a carnivore biologist and a reclusive tracker go up the mountain to bring the animals in alive. Their hunt becomes a fight to get back down alive.
Large flakes drift down. Inside, the fire is dying.
Sherry slips into her boyfriend’s snow boots and goes out for an armful of firewood. A few yards away, in the brush, something has been watching since the car pulled in.
Her scream doesn’t carry far in the snow and the woods. Inside, Tim sleeps with the music still playing.
Matt Leone, a Chicago novelist behind on his book and on his marriage, has borrowed a friend’s chalet in Cougar Estates, a development cut into the forest above town. His only company is a house cat that he can’t stand. With coffee and a secret morning cigarette, he watches through binoculars as the sheriff questions Sherry’s boyfriend Tim next door, until the deputy’s dog drags them around the side of the cabin, to the horror of Sherry’s remains.
John Ashburn, the developer, wants the situation resolved quietly. The lifts open at Christmas.
Ski lifts in Cougar Estates coming soon · Opening Christmas
At a children’s cross-country race, a boy stops to fix a loose binding while the others ski on. By the time the families pack their cars, his mother is staring up at the treeline.
That night, at the V.F.W. Lodge, the town argues about bounties and animal rights, until a pale deputy waves the Sheriff into the hallway.
But if some lunatic did this, he certainly was one hell of a beast.
Sheriff Sasenick
Bounties. Animal rights. A town arguing with itself.
The Sheriff wants a bounty on day one. The animal rights activists fight back.
Adriana Gilligan, a carnivore biologist from Boulder, brushes away the pine needles and finds the prints. She casts them in plaster. In the morgue, she measures the bite marks with calipers. Sherry and the boy were killed by two different mountain lions, larger than any on record. Lions don’t hunt together. They don’t hunt people.
Each print is unique. It’s like a fingerprint. See this line? He probably cut himself as a cub.
Adriana
That night Adriana and Matt follow fresh tracks to the next chalet. Matt’s flashlight swings up into a tree and finds a lion’s face, whiskers dark with blood, and what is left of Sherry’s boyfriend.
By morning, Ashburn has shot a cougar on his own property and wants the press there for a photo op. Adriana checks the paw and the teeth.
You’ve killed the wrong cat and the guilty ones are still on the loose.
Adriana
He wants the press there for a photo op.
Adriana checks the paw and the teeth. Wrong cat.
The deputy tells the TV news crew that the town got its cat. On a fresh run, a lion springs from the trees and cuts off a young skier. He falls and starts to pray, faster and faster, 20 feet from it. Then the lion sees a deer.
The boy makes it down the mountain with a broken leg, screaming while the cameras are rolling.
The Sheriff’s Office of Cougar County is declaring the ski slopes closed, effective immediately.
Sheriff Sasenick
Twenty feet from it, he starts to pray.
Then the lion sees a deer.
Only one man in the county can track a cougar. Sean Mitchell spent seven years between Iraq and Afghanistan and came home to a cabin four miles past the end of the road, with two bloodhounds and a horse. Matt and Adriana cross a rope bridge to bring him a permit with his name on it. He meets them with a rifle, then names his conditions.
I’m in charge. I give the orders and you take ’em. We do it my way or no way.
Sean
Four miles past the end of the road.
A permit with his name on it.
Sean on horseback, the dogs ahead; Adriana and Matt behind on a quad with one spare tank of gas. Sean leads them higher, away from town, away from the plan. By the second morning the dogs are gone, there is no signal, and a lion is watching them from a ledge above the refuge.
As soon as you think you’re on their trail, they’ll swing around the rears and start hunting you.
Sean
Swipe →
Matt Leone
mid-30s · the observer
A Chicago novelist with a publisher deadline, a marriage conducted over Zoom from where he hides his vice for smoking cigarettes — Marlboros his wife doesn’t know about. Afraid of the dark, of heights, and of the cat that came with the chalet that his friend has given him the keys to. Matt is the one who ends the hunt.
Adriana Gilligan
30 · the expert
A carnivore biologist, born in Argentina to an Irish father. She reads the scene of an animal attack the way a pathologist reads a body and keeps a dart rifle in the trunk of her Subaru Outback. Her confidence can outrun her caution.
Sean Mitchell
50s · the tracker
Iraq and Afghanistan. Lives alone in a cabin past the end of the road, with two bloodhounds and a horse. The county calls him an unstable recluse but hires him anyway. He needs to command the hunt, and that need will cost him.
Swipe →
Tom Crawford
forest ranger
Clean-cut and by the book, a forest ranger everyone in town likes. He signed off on every permit up that mountain, and every one of them is now evidence against him.
John Ashburn
developer, Cougar Estates
A MAGA businessman from the mountains. He shoots the wrong lion and calls the press. Nothing will delay his first ski season.
Sheriff John Sasenick
late 50s · born in the county
A good guy who has never seen real crime. He wants a bounty on day one. In the end, he is the one who closes the mountain.
Mountain lions hunt alone and avoid people. These two do neither. The film follows them the way the script does, through evidence: plaster casts, bite spacing measured with calipers, a scarred pad that identifies one cat like a fingerprint. A full view is rare and earned.
They are not taking revenge. We built our houses in their territory.
And we all keep moving deeper and deeper into their territory. Sooner or later, we’re going to start looking like deer to them too.
Adriana
The quad is at the bottom of a ravine. Sean, half-drugged by a dart meant for a lion, sleeps by the fire at the mouth of a cave with Matt beside him. Adriana keeps watch from a stand thirty feet up a pine.
At dawn her receiver picks up a signal. The cat is within ten feet. It is in the tree behind her. It leaps. Her rifle drops through the branches to the snow, and the lion circles the trunk below her.
The cat is within ten feet.
It is in the tree behind her.
Matt wakes to Adriana’s voice. Sean’s last venison steaks have gone bad in the saddlebag; Matt slings it over his shoulder and goes out. He sees the lion under Adriana’s tree, and a second one trotting into the cave where Sean is still asleep.
He ties Sean’s rope to the reeking bag, throws it, and reels it in a few inches at a time. The lion crouches, tail flicking, and goes for it. Adriana jumps, rolls to the rifle and darts it in the chest. It goes down. It will live.
That was a brilliant move.
Adriana
It goes down.
It will live.
“Once you’ve figured out the nature of the beast, you know what makes him tick. It’s like knowing how to end a story. Once you know where it’s going, the end is obvious.”
They leave the sleeping lion in the snow. Matt lights a Marlboro, and the two of them start down the ravine, hoping to reach some sign of civilisation before sunset.
Television
Cougar County
Images are concept visualisations. · Screenplay © Robert Bernacchi / Santa Lucia Productions, LLC · Confidential · Poster artwork © the respective rights holders
