Film Review — "Hunted"
Mother Goose, but make it Grindhouse!
Hunted, a Shudder original, opens with a prologue certifying the age-old theme that the patriarchy is, indeed, the worst. It comes in the form of a huntress orating a wolf-centric legend to her young son. From here it becomes quite evident that what we are about to witness is a survival story of a woman forced into a situation wherein she must fight for her life or otherwise be tortured and killed by awful men. But as harrowing as it all sounds, the film lacks cohesion, resulting in a muddled attempt at cathartic revenge cinema.
French comic artist Vincent Paronnaud, the Oscar-nominated co-director and co-screenwriter of Persepolis, recognizes how to tell a children’s story without watering-down the content’s maturity. He has an acute wit and a rather macabre sense of humor that lends itself well to the weaving of a modern Grimm tale that’s digestible for today’s young audiences. When it comes to shooting a grownup live-action thriller rooted in fable and genre, however, Paronnaud, while well-intentioned, appears very far out of his element. Because… not to be an asshole about it, but… the execution of Hunted is a tad… cartoony.
The two-dimensionality begins with its two lead characters. As a protagonist, it’s difficult to genuinely feel for Eve when we’re given so little of her backstory. We know almost nothing about her, save a vague idea as to what she does for a living and the fact that she was nearly abducted. So, in the abstract, yes, I sympathize with her. Of course, no matter whether I know them or not, I’m always going to have the back of a woman being preyed upon by predatory men, but apparently that is all Paronnaud assumed his audience needed, narratively speaking, in the character development department.
He does play with visual symbols a bit, though. The choice—and yes, I’m sure it was a choice—to dress Lucie Debay in a red hooded jacket was not lost on me. Given the wolf fable as a framing device, the story of Little Red Riding Hood was undoubtedly at the forefront of the filmmaker’s mind. As Eve’s victimhood morphs into man-eater mode, she eventually dons a blue warpaint that is virtually synonymous with Braveheart warriors. It becomes abundantly clear by this point that we’re no longer watching a cat-and-mouse chase. Eve has gone full combatant. And Debay commits. When she snaps, a primeval storm gets unleashed back upon her would-be violators.
The main antagonist is simply named The Handsome Guy, and actor Arieh Worthalter definitely lives up to the moniker. Aesthetically, the casting of Worthalter is spot-on. He has incredibly devilish good looks, almost as if Bradley Cooper and Michael Fassbender made love (JFC, swoon) and had a baby. But performance-wise his presence is iffy. He is by no means a bad actor, he just doesn’t seem to match the movie—or at the very least his co-star. Debay is going for a balls-to-the-wall approach, whereas Worthalter is giving us a more even-keeled flavor of demented. The goal, I gather, was to embody a type of composed menace—a welcoming evil hiding behind a nice guy persona.
And yet… this Handsome Guy is never really scary, no more than any other entitled man. Maybe it’s because he lacks mystery. I mean, we spend an odd amount of time with this dude whom we’re supposed to fear. It makes you wonder which subject the filmmaker is more infatuated with. It’s for this reason that one of the film’s major missteps is that, in the end, I think I’m more familiar with the villain than I am the heroine.
Actually, the most unnerving thing about The Handsome Guy is probably Worthhalder’s ADR. He’s a francophone Belgian actor in an English-language film with an eerily lucid accent. His words are so clean and pronounced that they practically have to be looped. It’s subtle, yeah. I wouldn’t expect most people to pick up on it, but it’s there. If I’m wrong and that’s just how he spoke on set in the moment, well then goddamn you, you silver-tongued maniac. Now I’m wondering if that, too, was a conscious choice, hmmm.
The film’s inconsistencies are not limited to the two lead performances, unfortunately. Tonally, this movie is all over the place. Paronnaud seems so determined to have his feet on both sides of every line when it comes to which atmosphere he’s trying to create at any given minute. Moments of terror are routinely undercut by moments of black humor, and they sort of end up canceling each other out and thus render the scene confounding and voiceless…
I’m very excited to see what Shudder has in store for the rest of its 2021 original programming, but regrettably Hunted is a blunder.
