The Hunt - review

One of the things cinema is great at is exposing your biases, forcing you to acknowledge the humanity in others, even if you are diametrically opposed ideologically to whoever is on screen, and look inwards at you own flaws. One of the more surprising examples of this recently is the Blumhouse produced Get Out, which made a slice of liberal leaning America recon with its own deeply held prejudices right as it was positioning itself as smugly superior to the newly emerged ‘deplorable’ Trump fan base.

The Hunt sees Blumhouse once again trying to infuse a nuts-and-bolts horror/thriller with an incisive contemporary political edge, this time with muted results. The premise is that a group of redneck deplorables wakes up in the middle of a ‘Dangerous Game’ style kill zone, set up by a separate group of wealthy liberal elites. As the victims are quickly picked off with bloody glee, Crystal (Betty Gilpin) emerges as a protagonist that no one should want to fuck with, possessing superhuman combat skills that would put the cast of Predator to shame. Gilpin is fantastic here, creating a unique and entertaining action hero with just the right amounts of crazy, determined, and underlying humanity.

Unfortunately no one else manages to rise above the two dimensional caricatures they were written as. Plenty of jabs are made at both sides of the American political spectrum but none has enough truth or specificity to connect with any weight. The elites trip over themselves trying to find the right politically correct words to mask their obvious narcissism, whereas the deplorables seem to have had most of their dialogue lifted out of a New-Yorker cartoon, and the tone is kept too light for the film to make a convincing case for nihilism.

For a while it looks like Gilpin might be the key to saving the films muddled messaging but eventually the screenplay undercuts her, with a twist that lets the last of the air out of an already deflated premise. There’s plenty of fun, carefree violence in The Hunt, and we get some nice venom spitting from Hilary Swank and Glenn Howerton in supporting roles, but given the charged nature of this film’s release* it fails do anything except traffic in the same broad stereotypes that it wants to skewer.             

*Look it up, It's too depressing to go over the whole thing here.