Hunted - Simple and Horrifying
When it comes to horror, I am a big fan of all sub-genres and styles. Perhaps one of the styles I like the most is simple. Oftentimes horror movies can get overly complex, sometimes it’s a good thing but more often than not it just turns into the muddled mess of ideas which requires the dreaded main character exposition break in the middle of the film to explain to you, the viewer, what exactly is going on. A simple film on the other hand does not suffer from this downfall. These films are typically filmed in one location, with linear character development and contain no backstory or information on the characters to get in the way of the horror. One of the more recent Shudder Exclusives Hunted has all of that and more, in fact, they go so far as to not even give most of the characters names.
The film follows Eve (Lucie Debay), a real estate agent of some sort, on a trip to a part of the country not familiar to her. After a tough day on the job, she decides to leave her hotel and her cell phone behind to go to the bar and get a drink. Now you may be saying to yourself “But Bud, you told me that none of the people had names in this movie but now you say the movie is about Eve?” Literally they say her name once in the first five minutes of the movie and then never again in the entire film, I had to check IMDB to get her name...don’t question my motives.
As I said this film is very simple. In the first five minutes of the film you meet Eve, see her annoying texting boyfriend and then she heads to the bar. From that moment forward we are into horror territory. No back story about her and her boyfriend's strained relationship, no details about her job of what brought her out to this part of the country, hell, the movie doesn’t even exactly say where they are. All you get is her, in the bar getting hit on by an annoying drunk guy, a handsome guy saving her from the drunk guy and BOOM she ends up in his car smooching and then his brother jumps in the car and they start driving away.
Obviously, Eve is taken aback, especially when the pair won’t let her out of the car. After some protesting, they finally let her out on the side of the road. She walks back to a gas station to use a phone but the handsome guy and his brother show up, kill the gas station attendant and throw Eve in the trunk. They drive off into the woods where the pair of dudes plan on killing her and without too much explaining, you get the feeling that this isn’t the first time the handsome man has done this, his “brother” on the other hand appears conflicted. When the handsome man asks the “brother” for a kiss in a tense moment, the car crashes into a tree and Eve is free.
The film is 85 minutes long and everything explained thus far is about the first 15-20 minutes. The remaining hour of the film is the handsome man and his “brother” chasing Eve through the woods, then the forest starts attacking the men, then Eve gets a spiked bat and starts chasing back, then they end up on a construction site where there is an epic pillow fight to the death with wolves and shit. This is an absolutely insane film that for maybe the last 30 minutes or so has zero dialogue except for Eve and the handsome man screaming and grunting at each other as they try to kill one another. It’s absolutely amazing how much it does with so little.
Don’t get me wrong, there is some amount of character development. First and foremost you find out exactly how sick and twisted the handsome man is, you find out the timid man he calls brother isn’t his brother and they give you a hint and maybe how the two crossed paths in the first place. Again, none of this is explicitly explained in the film though. The story kind of progresses as you would expect with a couple of people chasing each other through the woods and through that journey, based on their actions, you learn everything you need to know about them. Simple, subtle and succinct, sometimes these make for the best horror films and Hunted is one of them. Check it out now on Shudder.
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