Movies

The Hunt review – gory Trump-baiting satire is more hype than horror


How do you solve a problem like reviewing The Hunt? The schlocky horror film would, ordinarily, garner little attention from people outside genre fans and a handful of critics. But given that the movie is supposedly a satire about liberal elites literally hunting rural Trump voters – or so months of buildup have it – The Hunt now comes with, to put it mildly, some baggage.

The film, directed by Craig Zobel and written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, appears, at first glance, to purposely provoke – it starts with an anonymous group text chain, in which one person references “the rat-fucker-in-chief” and another writes “Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables,” a reference to a Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign remark categorizing Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables”. The context of this line is, in the beginning, ambiguous, but the film soon literalizes it: 12 people wake up, gagged and confused, in the woods; a mysterious box sits in the middle of a field, Hunger Games-style, filled with weapons. (The script is loosely inspired by Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, about a rich man who hunts other humans for sport.) It doesn’t take long for every variety of death – shooting, exploding, stabbing – to descend from a hidden, prepared “liberal elite”.

The violence is gratuitous if cartoonish – one woman is shot at, impaled and then blown in half, filmed so you can confirm the half part. If you haven’t seen the trailer, The Hunt does play with who to root for and who, if anyone, you can trust. Deaths are often swift and occasionally surprising; the characters get a few lines for one-line stereotypes – rural woman from Wyoming, white wannabe rapper from Florida, Staten Island guy who loves guns (Ike Barinholtz), Ivanka fan in leggings (Emma Roberts) – before they’re picked off one by one. Despite each character recognizing the conspiracy theory “Manorgate” come to life, the only “deplorable” with a clue how to fight back is Crystal (Betty Gilpin, thankfully having a good time), a mysterious blonde with an even more mysterious knowledge of martial arts.

The Hunt’s release in the middle of coronavirus fears in the US is another unlucky development for an already unlucky, if somewhat predictable, rollout. The film was originally slated for release last September, but mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, on the same August day spooked test audiences and rattled a nation considerably numbed to mass gun violence news. Soon after, details about the film emerged and rightwing anger followed, even from Trump himself. Barely anyone had seen the movie by this point, but a week after the shootings, Universal pulled The Hunt.

Until February, when it returned with an updated marketing strategy riffing on the controversy. A more spoiler-heavy trailer meant to frame the concept as a joke featured the tagline: “The most talked about movie of the year is one that no one’s actually seen.” The film-makers have claimed they didn’t anticipate any controversy from a film pitting “liberal elites” against “deplorables” in an outrageously violent human hunt, which, given these incendiary times, seems like lobbing a mock grenade into a minefield and getting upset when people follow standard procedures and scatter. Nevertheless, they have somewhat of a point: if you can set aside the noise, you’re left with a boilerplate B-movie that doesn’t say nearly as much as it thinks it does. The jokes are basically the algorithmic aggregate of stereotypes spoken with a straight face, an opportunity to say “climate change is real” with genuine malice, poke fun at white liberal NPR listeners who debate using “black” v “African-American” (“White people – we’re the worst,” says one elite in reference to everything except his killing), and imbue “did you read that article?” with more menace.

Hilary Swank and Betty Gilpin in The Hunt.



Hilary Swank and Betty Gilpin in The Hunt. Photograph: Patti Perret/AP

Which isn’t to say there aren’t some redeeming qualities, namely Gilpin; it’s good fun to watch her slink into a bunker and spit, “bye, bitch,” or drawl through a rendition of the Tortoise and the Hare that has meaning because it ends in more violence. She bounces back from any injury in two seconds and has a genuinely entertaining one-on-one fight with Hilary Swank, as chief elite villain – both ridiculous elements in a movie meant to be ridiculous that actually work.

The rest of the satire, however, struggles to translate. In making the worst stereotypes of America’s political poles as extreme as possible, and America’s divide as literal and violent as possible, The Hunt feigns a viewpoint rather than actually having one. It takes aim at everyone, redeeming no one. Which feels circular, and queasy, and right back where we started: some empty talk about a divided nation, and a film thats probably not worth this much conversation.



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