IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 20th October
Seen: 30th October
For some strange reason, the idea of a movie diving into politics annoys a certain class of people who seem to think that movies used to be apolitical and only recently got infected. The truth of the matter is that all art, on some level, is political and some films are just more overt about it than others. This goes double for the Horror genre which has always been a great place to play with heavy political ideas (Look at Night of the Dead, Get Out or They Live for some prime examples of this) and recently has had a few films tackle the divide between the right and the left. Films like Tone Deaf or The Hunt tried to find ways to make fun of the divide, showing it to be comical and extreme in ways that maybe made for a half-decent film but was not great about the way it presented its politics. Night of the Hunted also has some problems with how it’s presenting politics, but without as much fun in how it’s trying to present those politics.
Night Of The Hunted follows Alice (Camile Rowe), an average woman who is on a road trip home with a friend and stops at an unsuspecting gas station seemingly in the middle of nowhere to fuel up the car. All of a sudden there’s a hail of gunshots seemingly from a sniper hidden on a billboard across the street, killing the owner of the gas station and Alice’s friend while leaving Alice alone in the gas station hiding from a maniac with a long-range weapon and a grudge against her that she will need to understand if she hopes of getting out alive… of course it helps her that this killer is incredibly chatty and a borderline cartoon of a human being, but still it will be a challenge in the long run.
Night of the Hunted is that rare breed of horror film that’s set entirely in a single small location with, mostly, one on-screen performer and a voice offscreen to create all the tension. It’s a simple setup that can really create some fascinating tension and even some truly great character moments. For the most part, Night of the Hunted has that vibe where Alice is spending a large amount of her time trying to hide from the sniper over the road who is talking to her on a walkie talkie and that simple setup should make for something exhilarating, a great character piece about Alice learning to be stronger or something like that. This kind of setup has worked before and the lead of this film is really good, this should work… except then they try to bring in politics in a way that’s so ill-thought-out that it can only ruin any energy the film had.
As I said right up the top, there is objectively nothing wrong with bringing politics into a film. Hell, a good filmmaker can make a film with any political message work, provided they handle them in a way that feels honest to their beliefs and doesn’t feel tacked on because they feel like they have to say something. Look at films like Saw X, a film that is a harsh critique of for-profit medical treatment and in particular the evil grifts that people come up with to exploit that system, that’s a political idea that’s carefully woven into a good story and fits the characters well.. Night of the Hunted treats the revelation that this film is heavily political as a dramatic twist without doing the hard work to set it up or make it interesting.
At about the half-hour mark, the shooter explicitly states that he is going after Alice because “People like her” are ruining his country. It’s not even subtle, they bring up people making fake rape allegations, racism, the word “Woke” is used to describe our protagonist who is also working at a pharmaceutical company so clearly she’s part of that whole covid vaccine conspiracy (you know, the one that said everyone who got vaccinated for covid should be dead by now) and all sorts of other extreme beliefs of the far right… and meanwhile Alice is a nothing character that barely seems to project any extreme left-wing ideology of any kind, indeed any character traits she does have need to be explained to us by the shooter.
This kind of creates a problem that Night of the Hunter can never really deal with, namely that our main character isn’t interesting enough to root for and the killer is so extreme that he is neither fun nor scary, it feels like an edgy meme taken to the extreme. While no concrete reason is ever given for why this is happening (and technically we don’t need one, motives are incidental) the number of things the shooter tries to use to justify his actions is almost laughable. It’s surface-level political satire where you just yell the phrase “Storm the capital” and that does the job for you. He also never shuts the fuck up, delivering lengthy monologues that feel like a checklist of cliche extremist ideas all thrown together into one person and none of it is interesting. Half of this stuff just sounds like the reply to a tweet that contains the phrase “I enjoyed The Last Jedi”, it’s not original, scary or funny… I’m just tired at this point.
This kind of unfocused scattershot cliche creation also doesn’t help the protagonist because she’s such a nothing character that you can’t really get why she’s been picked for this. They don’t do anything half as interesting as The Hunt did when they revealed that the villains of that film had picked the wrong person who just happened to have the same name as their intended victim, that might actually be a way to make your point better. Night Of The Hunted doesn’t feel like it has a point, it feels like they got half an hour into the film writing process, turned on Fox News and let that infect the screenplay without thinking about it… and by god does it drag down the entire film.
What also is not helping Night Of The Hunted is the fact that every character (there are more a few small characters, mostly there to give the film a body count) is a fucking idiot with no sense of self-preservation. How idiotic are these people? We’re at “Being told to run away from someone you know is a killer but instead just standing and staring at them” levels of stupid, the kind of stupid that makes it hard to feel bad for these characters when the inevitable happens to them. It’s also hard to care because, beyond the first 30 minutes, there’s no real tension here. Once the store has more holes than Swiss cheese and there are corpses all over the parking lot, any new person who stops the car nearby is so dumb that it’s hard to take this seriously and you know this film wants to be taken seriously because of all the ranting about serious issues it does!
Again, there would be nothing wrong about making an extreme conservative into a villain in a horror film (especially one who believes that vaccines cause autism or that wokeism is ruining everything, people who think that are morons and you can quote me on that one) but at the bare minimum, you have to make them an interesting character, even when it’s just a voice over the phone. We know a voice over a phone can be terrifying, the opening for the first Scream movie is basically a 10-minute version of this concept and proves how great it can be if done well but Night of the Hunted doesn’t have a scary enough villain or interesting enough protagonist to pull that dynamic off.
Night of the Hunted is a film that works mostly in theory, its concept is fascinating and the politics it slaps on haphazardly could be used to make for a thrilling piece of horror… unfortunately the execution of these ideas is so rough that it turns the film into a semi-parody of itself, this is what people think of when they think of politics in art. It’s just kind of tacked on and not anywhere near as clever as everyone seems to think it is. It’s a political film that does nothing interesting with the politics it’s playing with, it picked up a loaded weapon and shot itself in the foot while thinking it was doing something super cool.
