Film Festival Reviews

Fantasia Fest Movie Review: I Can’t Help But Wonder If “Hunted” Missed The Mark


 

Eve meets who she thinks is a charming guy in a bar. Yet things go terribly wrong once she realizes she has come across a psychopath and his accomplice. They engage in a death chase until she decides to fight back with the forest as her only ally.

Revenge movies are a particular kind of breed. It takes deft skill and genuine emotional plotting to really pull this kind of thing off, and if you fail, you can wind up glamorizing rape or torture porn. If you succeed, you clearly demonstrate the monstrous male ID and its destructive tendencies while uplifting a traumatized woman who fights back against the system. That’s what they all are, at their core. Standard plotting for these sorts of stories sets them up as visceral calls to action, and they always induce wincing over some painful slight. Caroline Fargeat showed us a masterful rendition of the genre with her neon-soaked “Revenge.” Vincent Parounnaud’s take on the rape-revenge drama incorporates Little Red Riding Hood mythology in its efforts to spin the story into new energies, but many little markers make me question its efficacy in storytelling and by failing in so many ways endorses several controversial ideas.

You might be confused seeing Vincent Parounnaud’s name attached as writer-director of this particular film. His previous works included “Persepolis” and a number of comic books that don’t dabble in horror all that much. Still, he’s here and he crafted a simple story.

Eve gets taken by two men one night after blowing off steam in a nightclub. When they drive her through the woods, their car overturns, freeing the poor woman into the surrounding wilderness while unleashing a carnivorous beast and his cohort to HUNT her down for disgusting pleasures. Keep in mind before all this started we introduce the movie with a little fairy tale about a woman being chased by a mob of men into the woods and subsequently allying herself with wolves to brutally slaughter her pursuers. The forest sides with the woman.

Cinematographer Joachim Philippe films the encroaching forest in gorgeously textured shots. Every patch of moss, every river bed, and every little animal feels beautifully realized culminating in a spectral sense of the forest as another character to this sordid tale. Throughout the film, we witness horrifying handicam footage of previous assaults/murders, splitting up the beautiful forestry. Whether it’s daytime or nighttime, the lighting eerily brings out mood and nuance to the villainous couple. Between dream sequences and nightmare murders, a slight edge creeps in as the film goes on, delving slightly deeper into chaotic colors and lighting while the violence all around ratchets up.

The acting duo of Luci Debay and Arieh Worthalter pull off this movie entirely. While most rape-revenge stories leave their female protagonist grunting and gasping their way through the film, Debay makes the most of it. The real showstopper is Worthalter, the figurative Big Bad Wolf. What starts as likable winds up to deeply unhinged to all-out manic/psychotic in a scene-stealing manner. Pretty much everything he’s in amplifies the tone and texture and the movie rewards that by showing much more of his perspective, the voices in his head, or the visions he keeps having. From minute one the movie is Worthalter’s simply because he’s given so much to work with: scene partners, nightmare sequences, monologues, even bloody stuntwork. That’s where part of my concern stems from.

This entire subgenre of horror revolves around watching a woman, beaten and bloodied, beat the sadistic man at his own game, and eventually hunt him down. While Worthalter’s character is far from nuanced, he’s extremely watchable and his performance far outweighs Debay’s up until the very end. It’s not entirely Debay’s fault. With the gimmick of the forest working against the evil man, Debay is granted a reprieve from suffering and we get to watch her relax (if you can call it that.) She unhinges at the end, culminating in a psycho-sexual murder, sure, but so much is given to Worthalter we’re not rooting for him so much as entranced by his performance.

The film breaks up its early acts by incorporating grainy footage of a woman in the process of being abused. Worthalter’s voice clearly rings out in an empty room screaming at an unknown woman, degrading her. Why do we need to see this? What purpose does it serve? We’ve clearly established Worthalter’s villainy and yet we have to delve deeper. We watch him delight in the footage he previously shot. Its brutalist display only doubles or triples down on what we already know. Which, at that point, the conceit treads on brutality for brutality’s sake territory and in a revenge story borders dangerously on endorsing sadism. We HAVE to see sadism at play in order to justify his eventual defeat. We already know Worthalter’s character’s ruthless villainy and his pure psychopathy.

Another element in the story revolves around a young boy and his mother stumbling into the plot of this movie. The frustrated boy tells our Big Bad Wolf the pair are out in the woods “preparing for the end of the world” when his mother clarifies she’s “teaching him necessary skills for a major event.” When the Big Bad Wolf kills the mother and terrorizes the boy, it’s an initiation for the boy to step into the male role displayed in front of him. In a bizarre turn of events, our protagonist Eve, after being captured again by the Wolf, escapes and the boy’s mother pulls a hunting arrow out of her skull challenging him to finally use the skills she taught him.

I worried this may turn into an eclipsing arc for a character we don’t truly know. His ascent to manhood offering a different path from the bloody one carved before him seems likely. The boy sets out to hunt the Wolf and save Eve. He shoots one arrow into the Wolf before letting the pair go. It’s a plot point completely abandoned in the wild chase at the very end of the film, sacrificed for the Wolf-vs-Eve confrontation we’ve been developing this entire time. Why murder the mom and waste the boy’s character just for one narrative beat? It all feels motivated, like it has to happen because the story demands it. Were it anything but horrific displays of violence I’d excuse the narrative development, but this movie wants to have its cake and eat it too.

The protagonist feels underdeveloped. The antagonist steals every scene. Any attempts at altering or course-correcting are lost to the demands of the narrative (and the allegory) which are themselves wrapped up poorly in a confrontation that winds up back in the complex Eve’s developing for her regular job. Its ending ties things up in a neat little bow and ends the allegory on a frenzied note displaying Eve’s descent into savagery as well. It begs the question: was the use of the magic forest a narrative crutch the director decide to eschew completely? Was the magic forest merely the comforting ground that helped incubate Eve into the fully realized killer she becomes at the end? Did leaving the forest turn her into a vicious fighter? Why was there a slow-motion scene with paintballers interrupting the grand chase? Why didn’t ANY of the side characters at the end do anything? You can’t introduce the son and his mom as plot points then forego the other witnesses. People will watch the final confrontation and scream at the bystanders to do something, anything.

I have no answers to these questions, only speculation. I worry that I’m wildly off the mark. I appreciate the craft behind this, I really do. Still, the weight given to the male side of this rape-revenge movie feels too heavy and unbalanced to the point I start to wonder what exactly this movie is about. I appreciate the weaving in of Little Red Riding Hood (Eve wears a bright red hood, Worthalter’s hairy body resembles a wolf) but it seems to absorb some of the attention necessary to round out the story. Its ending feels vaguely defunct as if ending on a note of finality that doesn’t have meaning so much as empty symbolism. Yes, Eve has “transcended” and joined the forest but her transformation occurred long before she ever stepped out of the woods. I need more from this movie and it doesn’t have more to give. Those who appreciate the trappings of the genre will appreciate it. I worry I’ve looked a little too deeply into this one and seen some serious shortcomings.

 

“Hunted” recently had its World Premiere at the 2020 Fantasia Festival

 

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