Hey, CineDump, you ever wondered what would happen if a meme generator, a Wikipedia article about Animal Farm, and a bucket of blood squibs got drunk and pity-fucked every French Extremist movie still hanging around at closing time? Well, in case you haven’t, The Hunt is here to answer that entirely hypothetical question.
The plot of The Hunt is simplicity itself: a bunch of conservative trolls wake up in a Hunger Games meet budget store Battle Royale version of The Most Dangerous Game where they are systematically hunted by sleek, wealthy liberals until a predictable Final Girl smashes her way to the heart of the conspiracy a la You’re Next, leading to a climactic show-down full of shattered glass, weaponized homewares, and some good old-fashioned face trauma, much like the lively final minutes of Tarantino’s own conservative shitshow, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Darlings, if you’re not reference exhausted yet, then you might just be the target audience for The Hunt, a film that will turn and wink so hard every ninety seconds it threatens to damage more than the nine-dollar optical nerve so proudly showcased in the opening gore set-piece. The Hunt’s sins are many, and in the spirit of its gleefully anarchic, why-the-hell-not approach to story construction, dialogue, and special effects, I’ve randomly decided on six (exactly half of the arbitrary number of hunted people for an extra creamy layer of half-baked, self-aware referencing).
Don’t be a goretease.
Guys, c’mon. It’s a mad, mad world out there, and unless we stick to some rules we’re not gonna make it. I don’t know how polite society does it, but in the horror world, there are a couple of iron-clad, unspoken rules of comportment (like trying not to grope each other at Cons, and not wearing real razor-sharp knives strapped to your fists when you’re passionately cos-playing as the ninety-seventh Freddy Krueger at our saddest costume contests), but these are rules for how genre fans treat each other.
It’s time we set a rule, hard and fast, for the squeamish filmmakers out there who take our money and leave us lonely--don’t be a goretease.
You know what I mean. Fangoria ran the image of one of The Hunt’s victims totally eviscerated. I’m talking mauled to the bone, organ trailing, tattered skin, Salo-by-way-of-your-conservative-uncle-on-Facebook (I see you, Harold), pure orgy of sadistic madness, and….
They blow that load literally ten minutes in.
Ten minutes, people.
After that, it’s nothing but sub-Robocop era showers of blood squibs. How lazy are the blood squibs? They say every time a blood squib fails to impress an audience, another incel has a joyless orgasm. When more than five hundred blood squibs are featured in the same film, the collective disappointment actually manifests as a vaguely poisonous gas that helps melt the ice caps faster (‘cause, as the film will remind you, “Global warming is REAL”--emphasis theirs). When more than twenty-thousand blood squibs burst, it rips a hole in time and retroactively makes every single person who ever loved you into an unapologetic sex criminal.
If the previous paragraph didn’t warn you, I’ll take a hint from The Hunt’s screenwriting tips page (which, sadly has been taken down after the film’s premiere--c’mon, Blumhouse, repost that shit) and just tell you in all caps: TOO MANY BLOOD SQUIBS MEANS YOU AREN’T TRYING.
Damn, that felt good. Why don’t I just scream my articles more often?
Well, anyway, there may not be sugar after the rebellion, but there sure as hell better be competent special effects and plenty of them. Don’t promise us “Animals of England,” and settle for lapdogs of Canada--sorry, those Animal Farm references are simply contagious.
Wait--painfully stilted conversation isn’t dialogue?
Which leads me to the film’s second sin of laziness--a slapdash approach to dialogue that makes already shallow characters on both sides of the political divide into exhausted meme fodder.
A butch liberal lady whose name we’ll never learn gripes about a friend “gendering” the conversation. A tubby Pizzagater screams about “crisis actors” while waving a gun at a refugee family. A soulless corporate lawyer chats about “optics” while a man who is only broadly described as “Arab” points out his “problematic” role in the ruse the liberal characters are working so feverishly to maintain. As I clumsily referenced earlier, the end of a frantic shoot-em-up set-piece concludes with an elderly woman shrieking about the reality of global warming, absolutely apropos of nothing. There’s not even a weak joke leading up the coup de grace --like the mulleted lady who dies choking on donuts could say, “Man, is it just me or is it getting hot in here?” Cue the global warming line. (Thanks, Mr. Blum, you can send my script doctoring fee to CineDump headquarters--we accept cash, checks, and confusing metaphors.)
I’m not shaming the movie for taking on all the talking points of the liberal vs. conservative divide in American culture. This is a very real problem that impacts how people live in their lives, how they interact with family and coworkers, and how they behave in the ever-increasingly powerful world of social media. And yes...a part of how people of both camps identify each other is by certain buzzword and phrases, and yes, yes, yes, this movie is a “horror-comedy,” that mix of neither gore nor giggles which means that any attacks on its quality can be excused by its subgenre status. But even comedies have to have characters treat each other with something approaching reality... at least sometimes.
As someone who has had the exquisite agony of working in peaceful coexistence with far right-wing people, even the most politically active, vocal people speak in a patois other than crudely strung together, bot-generated random buzzwords. Reducing all sides to a barrage of catchphrases and memes only further distances the film from it’s supposed stated purpose--to highlight the evils of lumping people together (unless they’re immigrants, of course) and finding a common humanity to unite us.
But hey, if you can’t do that--safe space, gendering, white privilege, cis, genderqueer, Islamophobia, Antifa...
And they call us Snowflakes…
That’s enough of the silly stuff--yeah, I will bitch ad nauseam about the unsatisfying special effects and the clumsy dialogue, but now I’m putting on my officially branded Liberal Cuntsuit (available in all sizes-- no body shaming here, kids) and we’re gonna address something very serious in this very juvenile movie:
The film’s second act is set almost entirely in a make-shift refugee camp in Croatia. The people there are lumped together by the dialogue as “Arab,” and Women In Hijabs is the shorthand for basically all the character development these people get. Our precious white heroes are subjected to the horrors of camp life--the dehumanizing intake process, bureaucratic apathy, crowding, and bowls of Dickensian slop. Just as it seems the film is going to put aside its commitment to smarmy buzzword jockeying to really lean into the imagery it’s depicting, our heroes are “rescued” and taken to their next Adventure in Liberal Land.
Let’s be clear--I didn’t come to The Hunt demanding that it weigh in on the moral ramifications of the worldwide refugee crisis. They promised me a bit of the old ultra-violence, and when that failed, they turned to the time-honored brown-people-as-props approach to entertainment that has dominated Western art since the days of black rams tupping white ewes and white boys in blackface were all the rage around the Globe theatre.
Is the refugee camp part of this incredibly expensive liberal fantasy? Is this supposed to be a real camp in Croatia? Let’s examine the implications of each theory:
If this camp is really a bunch of “crisis” actors as one of the film’s most repugnant characters maintains, then the message it sends is one of shocking, almost comically misplaced callousness. Now isn’t the time to dwell on the horrors of the refugee crisis, but let’s do it anyway. Mortality rates have been increasing exponentially for European camps. Fewer refugees are making it to “safety” and the ones that do are increasingly likely to meet a tragic end. The Rohingya crisis in modern-day Myanmar has been essentially ignored or consistently downplayed, and currently, with global policies that promote nationalism over empathy, there is no end in sight and no expectation of mercy--and that’s just one very specifically targeted people group. If this camp in The Hunt is all carefully crafted theatre for the benefit of the soon-to-be-dead hunteds’ tardy moral education, doesn’t its falsity prove the point of its most awful character while simultaneously downplaying the very real, very dire circumstances in actual camps?
If the camp is supposed to be real, at least the film acknowledges the reality of the lived experience of camp life. However, this leads to some other disturbing questions--what’s going to become of the people interred there and does the film even want us to care? We see a refugee family harassed, assaulted, manhandled by army officials, and nearly killed in a random act of violence--in essence, we endure in miniature the experience of refugees. Then, our magical white heroine carries us to the manor house, to a so-so orgy of tepidly choreographed violence, and then, a triumphant coronation complete with knock-off Louis Vuittons, classy champagne and irresponsibly sourced caviar (really, guys, liberals like to be uppity about the fish we eat, it’s one of our things) as she’s lifted into the clouds a la Grease. Bop-she-wop and away we go, but while the Final Girl and the world’s saddest air host share some caviar, we’re supposed to cheer as one person makes it out while thousands of people suffer and will die back in Croatia.
Crystal Mae (May?) Whoever couldn’t have loaded up a whole plane full of refugees and taken them back to Mississippi with her, and I’m not suggesting she should have, but the storytelling choices made make the refugee camp yet another under-done set piece, an afterthought, merely an obstacle to be overcome on our lily-white moral avenger’s incremental personal journey. Consistently placing the sanctity of one model-perfect human life over an entire sea of humanity is the kind of portrayal that leads to acts of mass callousness. By dehumanizing refugees, and using them as set-dressing, this film brings up a cogent point about the cultural divide in America only to add nothing to the dialogue.
But I’m Just Another Broke-Ass Liberal
Of all the strange observations the film makes, the idea that the cultural divide in America is primarily economic is one of the oddest. Yes, in conservative media, there is the eternal idea of the Liberal Elite, but uncritically embracing this idea broadly paints America the way the right-wing commentators see it in their wildest fever dreams: hard-working salt of the earth innocents against the depraved hyper-wealthy.
This is a pretty weird myth to fixate on and to build an entire lazy phantasmagoria around. Look at any set of numbers from either side of the ideological horseshoe--Republicans outearn Democrats. Corporations and people who occupy the legendary 1 percent are usually among the most conservative because they have the most to gain by not shaking up the status quo. Republican policies have overwhelmingly favored big business over the interests of the middle class and the economically disadvantaged.
So...what’s up with The Hunt?
The Hunt in this regard, plays like Conservative drag--amped up, campy, hyper exaggerated and hitting all the notes beloved by right-wing talking heads. Despite the flat jokes and uninspired mayhem, the movie, at its core, plays into the culture of victimhood that has led to such elaborate collective hysteria as QAnon and Pizzagate (which the movie shamelessly and frequently cites in case you forgot about it for twenty-six seconds).
White Women as the primary victims of profiling
This movie pulls a coveted double-Shyamalan: that’s right, people, hold your breath for not one, but two lukewarm twists. When Hilary Swank’s liberal ice queen squares off with Miss Redstate USA (cause there’s some polyphonic incoherence about the name here, this is how she’ll be referred to from now on), she reveals that she is not the internet troll that Swank’s character wanted so badly to annihilate. Sure, there is the similarity in name, but Miss Redstate USA also bears the other markers this film sees as marking one of conservative status: poor, a history of military service, antisocial behavior.
Miss Restate USA is selected and put through Fox News’s map of hell because she is a victim of profiling, like so many other gorgeous, well-read blonde wo--
Wait, what?
In a film that actively works to erase people of color (a term treated like another buzzword the liberals flaunt like their newly acquired weapons), making the crux of your entire shambling plot rely on the well-worn stereotyping-is-super-just-incredibly-awful trope might actually mean something if you made a gutsy choice and showed someone who actually suffers as a result of rampant stereotyping. Yes, white people are affected by stereotyping as well, but the kind of jumping to conclusions that leads to white people being snubbed or treated rudely can hardly be compared with the systematic profiling that has left countless people of color maimed or dead.
And the metaphor is…
Oh, the Animal Farm references. It makes my English teacher’s heartbreak. If you’re going to go all-in on an extended conceit like this, then John Donne the hell out of it. Have it mean something. Don’t just choose the first book that comes up when you Google “philosophical novel high school reading list,” and Lord of the Flies was already taken. C’mon. We’re all better than this.
And the grilled cheese speech. Even Miss Redstate USA knows it’s reaching to be a metaphor for something, and she honestly can’t even put a sentence together (a climactic killing spree ends with her explaining her drive for retaliation with a series of wide-eyed stares and breathy grunts--very Kurt Schwitters, but not very articulate). Is the cheddar supposed to be the liberals? The conservatives? Is this supposed to be like that pseudo-Zen koan Miss Redstate USA tells--that gritty reboot of the tortoise and the hare? Hell, who knows? And who wouldn’t think gruyere wasn’t the superior melting cheese?
Some questions are better left unanswered.
Pennie Sublime