Shudder Saturday: Night Of The Hunted (2023)

Director Franck Khalfoun has given us some great films. He made a strong debut with P2, and also gave us the impressive remake of Maniac. So it's a shame that he has helmed this, a remake of a Spanish horror movie, Night Of The Rat, that I have yet to see (and, sadly, only going by this mess, am now not in any rush to see either).

Camille Rowe plays a young woman named Alice. We know a few details about Alice that are shown or told to us from the earliest scenes. She is supposed to be heading to an appointment at a fertility clinic, but she is also not necessarily as keen on the idea as her partner is, considering she seems to have just slept with a work colleague. Anyway, the film really gets going when Alice ends up at a gast station in the middle of nowhere, becoming the prey of a sniper who starts to speak to her through a walkie-talkie. That's the concept, and it is, in theory, a good one.

While Rowe does a good job in the lead role here, and while there are a couple of decent bits of bloodshed to punctuate the cat and mouse scenario, there's a disappointingly juvenile approach to the characters. For how good Khalfoun is as a director, his writing, with Glen Freyer (reworking that original screenplay by Rubén Ávila Calvo and David R. L.), is absolutely atrocious. Alice has to be full of flaws, a whole assemblage of traits that can continue to feed the rage of the sniper. That's bad enough, but the sniper himself is a complete caricature, the kind of guy who began his journey decades ago with conversations that ended with him saying "ït's political correctness gone mad", voted for Trump, gets enraged at the thought of someone specifying preferred pronouns, and wants to fight back against everything he perceives as "woke". IF viewers had more of an inkling that this was all an act, an attempt to fool our lead into misunderstanding their motivation, then that might be more interesting, and fun, but it doesn't ever seem that way. And neither Khalfoun nor Freyer given our lead enough time or energy to refute so much of the bile being spewed forth through that walkie-talkie. 

I'll begrudgingly admit that the technical side of things is perfectly fine, with the lone gas station location and the nearby sniper location always shown well enough to maintain the correlation between the two. The audio and visual work is unspectacular, but always clear enough, and there's at least some extra solace to be gained from the fact that the runtime clocks in at just over 90 minutes. It also helps that Rowe is an appealing screen presence, otherwise this would have been completely unwatchable.

A real mess of a film, and one that suffers from the fact that those making it obviously believe they are delivering some kind of insightful commentary. Unfortunately, they end up embarrasing themselves by (inadvertently, I hope) presenting something that isn't too far removed from the kind of propaganda piece that would be endorsed by the likes of too-stupid-to-be-that-smart-too-smart-to-be-that-stupid Ben Shapiro and co.

3/10

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Netflix And Chill: Maniac (2012)

It was surely a fool's errand to even try to remake the notorious Maniac (1980), the film directed by William Lustig that remains a disturbing and grimy modern horror classic to this day. And Elijah Wood being involved? I am one of many who generally guffawed at the idea. Guffaw, I say, and guffaw again.

And here we are, eight years later. This remake has been acclaimed as a great film by many horror fans, and Wood has made a lot of interesting choices over the course of his career that highlight what a big horror movie fan he is. I figured it was time to finally see if this would work for me.

It definitely did.

Wood plays Frank, the maniac of the title. He spends most of his evenings killing women, scalping them, and placing the scalps on mannequins that he views as being able to act like live women. He tries to keep his worst impulses under control when he meets a young actress, Anna (Nora Arnezeder). But a man like Frank cannot keep everything under control for long.

Written by Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, who have both worked previously with director Franck Khalfoun, this is a very smart updating of the original Joe Spinell screenplay, and also manages to side-step the big hurdle of trying to replace the irreplaceable Spinell in the lead role. They do this by showing most of the movie from the POV of Frank, which makes it fresh and also makes it easier to avoid direct comparisons. And yet the spirit of the thing remains the same. This is a nasty piece of work, the central character is a nasty piece of work, and the death depicted onscreen is disturbing and visceral.

Wood, although not shown all that often, is actually quite a revelation in this role. He makes the most of his usual reserved style, but layers it under something disturbing and almost pulsating with murderous instinct. Arnezeder does well in her role, the one female who gets time to show herself as more than just what Frank is projecting. And there are others who do well, even as they just appear long enough to set themselves up as victims a lot of the time. America Olivo is Frank's mother, while Genevieve Alexandra, Liane Balaban, Megan Duffy, and Jan Broberg have a number of memorable moments.

In much the same way as the original, it would be easy to dismiss this as a misogynistic film. There ARE male victims, but they're killed off in a way that feels more flippant than the treatment given to the women. But that is what the main character does. His mind views women a certain way, he wants to kill women, that is his main aim. It's misogyny because he is the misogynist, and the film shows him descending further and further into a quicksand hell of his own making. It's not comfort viewing for anyone, but it's very well done, and horror fans will want to check it out.

I delayed and delayed this viewing, and I really shouldn't have. Don't make the same mistake.

8/10

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