Written by Vincent Paronnaud, Léa Pernollet, and David H. Pickering
Directed by Vincent Paronnaud
Starring Lucie Debay, Christian Bronchart, and Ciaran O'Brien
Running Time 1 hour and 27 minutes
Not rated - violence, sexual situations, language

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

The majority of Hunted, a revenge thriller from director Vincent Paronnaud (who collaborated with writer/illustrator Marjane Satrapi on Persepolis and Chicken with Plums) takes place within the forests of Belgium. It’s apt that it opens with a woman telling her son a fable over a fire about how wolves of the forest teamed up with a witch to take revenge on her oppressors. The animals, the trees, and the nearby river have a storybook feel to them. A wild boar causes a car crash. A praying mantis perches on an arm; black and yellow salamanders crawl over a rock. Following this opening scene, we meet our hero, Eve (Lucie Debay) although the film doesn’t spend much time with her until things take a turn for the worse. Following a little dancing and flirtation at a nearby club, Eve finds herself locked in a car and the latest victim of a man, credited as “The foreman” (Christian Bounchart), and his dim-witted and weak accomplice (Ciaran O'Brien).

The man’s intentions are clear; he’s a misogynist and a sadist. He wants to torment Eve, rape her, kill her, and capture it all on film. It’s a gruesome, misanthropic character, and Bounchart portrays him as a sociopath who is incapable of ever being sincere. The first person who Eve encounters who might help her, an affable gas station attendant, is brutally killed offscreen by the foreman. He flips from charming to evil in an instant. His plans are interrupted when, in a display of power, he asks that his accomplice kiss him, and he takes his eyes off the road. The car flips, letting Eve out of the trunk to run through the woods. Dubay is a terrific, if silent, final girl. She’s resilient, strong, and in boots and a red rain slicker (a nod to Little Red Riding Hood), she’s well dressed to survive in the woods for the next day or two as she runs from her captors. 

Hunted is a well-shot, gripping, and sometimes shocking film. It’s stylistic and often clever, such as a scene where a group of paintball players suddenly enters the frame. All we see are men with gear and guns, not knowing if they are friend or foe, until - a sudden burst of color. And another. Debay undergoes a dramatic transformation throughout the film. Her blunt, blond bob now sits upon her head as if she put her finger in a socket, pieces of earth in her hair. Her make up has melted down her face. She turns feral when she chases after the foreman, breathing and snarling like an animal.

But there is a significant mistake within Hunted’s script that holds it back. With three writers on this film, it lacks clear intention. Eve is certainly the protagonist, but the writers didn’t want to develop her, or give her much dialogue. They wanted to focus, instead, on the foreman, on his anger and disgust with women. How many scenes do we need to see of him talking about it? It’s gratuitous, and I say this in a film that also has moments of brutal violence. We see that he likes to watch footage of torture on his camera. OK. Then we see him doing it again (thankfully we’re largely spared seeing what the footage contains). The choice to make him a filmmaker seems unnecessary. There’s nothing in the film about the footage ever being recovered. Hunted has style, suspense, and terrific music from Roman Vinuesa, who also worked on Chicken with Plums. I just wish that the writers took a step back and question why they needed to give a majority of the film’s running time, focus, and dialogue to its most cruel and ugly element.

Hunted will be streaming on Shudder beginning this Thursday, January 14