A teenager who refuses to leave her room finds herself dropped in the woods with a grandfather she barely knows, and the isolation turns out to be the least of her problems.
What is Hair of the Bear about?
Hair of the Bear opens with sixteen-year-old Tori pulling away from school and, by extension, from the rest of her life. Her mother's answer is blunt: a drive to a rustic cabin on the remote border between Manitoba and the United States, and into the care of a grandfather whose French-Canadian, woodsman habits are a world away from anything Tori knows. What starts as a story about a reluctant teenager adjusting to life without a phone signal or familiar comforts turns considerably darker once the wilderness stops being a backdrop and becomes a threat. Tori is pulled into a tense, escalating game of cat and mouse that forces her to learn the old man's survival instincts fast, not as a lesson but as a matter of getting through the next few days alive. The film sits at the intersection of coming-of-age drama and thriller, using the remoteness of the setting to strip away every easy escape and leave Tori with only her own resourcefulness and her grandfather's hard-won knowledge of the land.
About the cast
Malia Baker plays Tori opposite Roy Dupuis as her grandfather, with Catherine Bérubé, Robert Naylor, Jonathan Lawrence, and Sage Boulanger McLeod filling out the cast around them. The generational gap between the two leads is central to the film's tension, giving the story a second layer beneath the immediate danger of the woods.
Context & significance
Co-directed by James McLellan and Alexandre Trudeau, Hair of the Bear is a Canadian production set on the remote frontier between Manitoba and the northern United States. The border setting is more than scenery; it isolates Tori from every convenience of modern teenage life and forces the drama to play out on the land's terms, a choice that gives the 2026 thriller its distinct, unglamorous edge over more urban entries in the genre.
Watching Hair of the Bear on Ktime
Hair of the Bear is available on K-Time with Persian dub and Persian subtitles, making the tension of its remote setting easy to follow for Farsi-speaking viewers. Watching only requires a free K-Time account, and the film's page can be browsed without logging in first.