The Hunt (2020)
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The Hunt Movie Review
The Hunt is a 2020 horror thriller film directed by Craig Zobel and starring Betty Gilpin. It’s a frustratingly flawed, but undeniably fun film.
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“Depends on whether they’re smart pretending
to be idiots or idiots pretending to be smart“
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Twelve strangers wake up in a clearing. They don’t know where they are or how they got there. In the shadow of a dark internet conspiracy theory, ruthless elitists gather at a remote location to hunt humans for sport. But their master plan is about to be derailed when one of the hunted, Crystal, turns the tables on her pursuers.
I was quite excited for this movie as finally Hollywood made a movie that mocks alt-left people just as much as those who are alt-right. It portrays just how horribly biased and simply insane both of these groups are, and finally we got a movie that satirized them both without ever taking any sides whatsoever. I might be leaning more toward the left or more toward the right, but I personally found it right in the middle as it equally destroyed them both.
However, The Hunt is just an okay film at the end of the day. I appreciate its originality and boldness, but at the end of the day it’s not nearly as brave or as sophisticated as it thinks it is. The various jabs at both of these extremist groups were simply too on-the-nose, at times even laughably so. The dialogue needed much more nuance while the screenplay is an utter mess as the runtime is overly short for this many ideas, points of interest and twists and turns.
Betty Gilpin is phenomenal, she steals the show throughout and plays such an interesting main character who is torn between these two insane groups. She is a badass, but also genuinely cold and calculated person, and that made her quite unique and interesting. The other characters are mostly not as memorable, but Hilary Swank is excellent with the final fight between the two being so entertaining. Glenn Howerton of ‘Sunny’ fame is also reliably amusing as this rich bastard. I found the horror/thriller elements and the fights and killings so much gruesome fun, but again the film is more fun than sophisticated, which was a problem to me.
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The Hunt is never as sophisticated as it thinks it is. Its screenplay is a mess as the short runtime prevents it from ever exploring any of its themes properly while the dialogue is simply lacking any nuance. However, the movie is still very original and admirably unbiased in its pitting of alt-left against alt-right extremists, the gruesome action is a lot of fun and Betty Gilpin steals the show in a very interesting, cool main role.
