Shudder Saturday: Hunted (2020)

This is a very strange film to review. Mainly because I didn't like it. Then I did. Then I started to really like it. And then it just ended. I knew it would end at some point, of course (not every film has to be a Lav Diaz epic, thank goodness), but the ending felt a bit abrupt and disappointing. Which led to me remembering how I hadn't been won over by the beginning. So I had to work a bit harder to retain the positive thoughts I had about it, and to not let the weaker moments bookending everything affect my whole viewpoint.

The central part of the film, the best through line, concerns Éve (Lucie Debay), a young woman who is saved from a pushy guy at a bar by a man who seems to be normal and nice (Arieh Worthalter). Unfortunately, he's exactly the opposite of what he appears to be, and he wants to abuse Éve and kill her, helped in this by his accomplice (Ciarán O'Brien). Things are complicated by the tenacity of Éve, and also a woodland encounter with a woman credited as The Huntress (Simone Milsdochter) and her son, Jeremy (Ryan Brodie).

A heady brew of recalibrated fairytale elements and ugly misogyny, Hunted is most effective when boiling everything down to the basics. A bad man wants to hurt, and kill, a female victim. It remains effective in the scenes that have that bad man lashing out at the person supposed to be helping him. And any moments involving The Huntress and Jeremy work brilliantly. All of these scenes have an undercurrent of viciousness intertwined with a strangely surreal quality, and they feel like the movie that director Vincent Paronnaud most definitely wanted to make.

But then you have the rest. The opening is easy to forgive, when you see how the rest of the film plays out it feels like a nice bit of scene-setting, but the last 10-15 minutes are astonishingly bad, throwing in some other characters, including a bunch of paintballers and some people viewing a house. This may have been done to emphasise the idea of the pure hunt crashing through into something close to our actual reality, I guess, but it feels ridiculous and out of step with the atmosphere that was so nicely created throughout the rest of the film. Writers Stephen Shields and David H. Pickering may have come up with this idea, or perhaps it came from the draft tweaking from Paronnaud and Léa Pernollet.

Nobody stands out, performance-wise, but everyone does a good job. Worthalter is an incredibly effective psycho, and deserves some credit for his absolutely unhinged turn (especially in the second half), but everyone feels like they're being puppeteered by Parronaud, in a way that is almost literal. I wouldn't be surprised if there were storyboards for this that initially had the whole thing planned out for something that was to be fully animated (especially when you consider how well Parronaud has worked in that form previously).

Hunted may lose you. It may prove to be an ultimately disappointing viewing experience, especially if you don't appreciate the atmosphere and dark playfulness of it. But it may just be one that you end up appreciating a lot more when you think of the reasoning behind some of the decisions made. That's where I ended up anyway.

7/10

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