The Hunt

Grade: B+

“The final hurt you, but not bad.” I had a teacher say that to me once, at the end of a semester. Director Craig Zobel’s film The Hunt came very close to being one of the best movies of the year for me. Its first hour is wonderful, then the final half hour hurts it, but not bad. What could have been one of the year’s best ends up being one I still greatly admire.

I guess I would describe The Hunt as a gory, politically charged, darkest-of-the-dark comedy/thriller satire. It’s like a more intense version of The Game and The Hunger Games, with the smart observant black humor of Wag the Dog and Network. It takes some inventive turns. When the characters are introduced near the beginning, I thought I knew who the main one would be, and even who their inevitable love interest would become, only for the screenplay to put an abrupt end to that possibility. Then it happened again. “Oh, maybe this person will be the primary character whose journey we follow…nope – guess not.”

I have often yearned for a horror movie where we vividly see action from the killer’s point of view, because seeing nothing but screaming victims running around, going into the basement, etc. gets old. The Hunt gives us a satisfying taste of that, sometimes to the point where the line is blurred as far as who to root for. Or we forget. Or we don’t know who to trust and what is real. The audience feels everybody’s paranoia. In the cast, Hilary Swank and Amy Madigan (nice to see her again) are particularly effective. Our protagonist turns out to be Betty Gilpin, who carries the movie spectacularly. Is it too early, far-fetched, or crazy to be thinking about a dark-horse Oscar nomination for her? She is marvelous here. Every syllable of her Southern drawl feels authentic and pierces you to the heart. She’s got this role in the palm of her hand, even when the material isn’t always doing her the best favors. I never thought I would be so captivated to hear the telling of a “tortoise and the hare” type fairy tale. Betty Gilpin will be a name to remember and a person to watch.

I suppose an explanation for the plot was in order eventually, and we get all our answers in the film’s last half hour. The amazing first hour is silly with style, and then the final act is just silly. The main revelation is absolutely preposterous. The idea that these people all of a sudden have the desire, time, money, locations, resources, and general wherewithal to do what they do is laughable. Not to mention that for everything to go according to plan, they would have had to rely on incredible coincidences and long shots to work out just right. And a character runs upstairs (instead of out of the house to safety) when a killer is after them – one of the oldest and lamest conventions in the book. And some people recover too easily from a fight. They walk and talk and look like a million bucks when they should be rushed to the hospital for medical attention.

The Hunt’s first two-thirds are scintillating, then its last third runs out of steam and is kinda hokey. But still, what we’re left with is pretty darn great. Remember track #5 off Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album?

Grade: B+