The Hunt may be a cursed film.
Its overtly political themes and over-the-top violence caused small waves of preemptive outrage even before anyone had really seen it, and a pair of mass shootings in the U.S. only added to the electricity in the air before its scheduled release. Despite these precarious table settings, its existence wasn’t truly threatened until the media sensed a story. Coverage by The Hollywood Reporter caused Fox News to wag the dog with some reactionary and dimly-informed faux indignity, which trickled down to the news feed of our barely-literate Commander in Chief who tweeted something in response that honestly isn’t worth looking up.
In August of 2019, Universal pulled the film.
After some campaigning by its producer and director, a new release date was set for mid-March 2020—and if you are currently alive, you know what happened then. The Hunt survived manufactured outrage and media attacks only to become another theatrical casualty of COVID-19, the effects of which eclipsed any other story and are already changing the way we see and interact with the world on levels both personal and global.
Ongoing worldwide pandemic aside, there is a delicious irony to the political and journalistic coverage that jeopardized the release of Craig Zobel’s The Hunt; without giving too much away, the inane game of telephone that so misrepresented the film proves its central point in a way that even the filmmakers could not have predicted.
The film’s prologue displays a familiar scene: a group text thread, complete with animal GIFs and unrestrained political commentary. It also contains a pointed and oddly specific promise to hunt and kill a group of deplorables at a place called The Manor; if it seems like a dark joke, the following scenes would seem to prove otherwise.
A group of strangers wakes up in the woods, gagged and confused. As they awaken and explore their surroundings they converge upon a large crate in a field, filled with a variety of high caliber weapons. Barely before the baffled group finishes divying them up, shots ring out from a distance and the hunt begins. This effective cold open introduces a first act that unfurls with a sense of bleak humor and brutal violence which comes with a nagging sense that the hapless conservatives are not the only ones being manipulated.
In a recent review for Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man I explored its powerful narrative subtext and how its implications regarding feminism and #MeToo enriched what was already a well shot and unyieldingly tense thriller. In that case, I compared subtext to its sneakier and less graceful cousin, agenda.
On the surface, The Hunt seems like a case study; with a film so provocatively political, surely it must have an agenda of its own. And if you’re like me, you will dedicate some small but wary portion of your brain to monitoring that agenda—how it uses the film as a stage to make its case before stepping out from behind the curtain to drive home its message in the final act.
What actually happens is somewhat more scattershot—the script goes out of its way to antagonize both “red and blue” folks without ever throwing its lot in with either, and in performing such a grisly and elaborate form of whataboutism the film stops short of taking a clear stance of its own, most likely leaving both parties confused and ambivalent.
The main problem, it turns out, is not the film’s politics, but just regular old movie problems. Its satirical edge is dulled by cumbersome exposition, inadequate characterization, and a grim sense of humor that often fails to land either because it’s reaching, or because of a general lack of empathy—the film seems to care more about proving its delightfully detached wit than it does telling a story with a human heartbeat. The chilly and sylph-like Crystal (Betty Gilpin) proves herself to be smarter and more competent than just about everyone else around her, but neither she nor anyone else develops into anything resembling an emotionally round character.
Abundant references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm are shoehorned in to obscure symbolic meaning rather than define it, and myriad hot-button issues are similarly force-fed not so much to take part in a conversation about the importance of social syntax or political systems, but to ostensibly troll so-called Social Justice Warriors. What we end up with is something altogether too silly and incoherent to justify the all the outrage.
These substantial shortcomings relegate The Hunt to something more trivial than it should be, and one is able to imagine a film somewhere in here that would have made each of us, no matter which side we land on, empathize in a new or meaningful way with someone we imagine as impossibly different, and find in that empathy the clarity and wherewithal to unite against a common enemy. Instead, it amounts to something less than the sum of its parts: an eagerly bloody parable laughing at its own jokes and missing an opportunity for something more consequential.
As for any suspected (and much-talked-about) political agenda, it never quite materializes; the film sidesteps that for a not unwelcome assertion about the importance of truth, and how our words affect the lives of others—which is what makes The Hunt’s extra-cinematic controversy so sublimely fitting. In their decontextualized bluster, the talking heads that imperiled the film’s release proved its point more poetically than did the film itself.