90 min | R | March 13, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Wealthy liberals kidnap a dozen strangers and hunt them for sport, certain their victims are deplorables who had it coming. One of the prey, a quiet Mississippi woman, turns out to be very good at staying alive. The premise is loaded, but the movie fires in every direction and hits nothing.
Twelve strangers wake in a clearing with gags in their mouths and a stocked arsenal a short run away. Someone is hunting them for sport. The hunters are wealthy progressives who have convinced themselves their prey are gun-loving deplorables who deserve it. The Hunt presents itself as a satire of American political tribalism. Its actual engine is a viral conspiracy theory, a rumor about elites murdering rural Americans that turns out to be both false and self-fulfilling. The film wants to mock the coastal elite and the conspiracy right at once, and it keeps swinging at a target that will not hold still.
Betty Gilpin plays Crystal, a drawling Mississippi woman with combat instincts and a flat affect that gives nothing away. Gilpin builds the performance out of pauses and sidelong glances. She talks slow and thinks fast, and she is the only character the film bothers to make human. Hilary Swank plays Athena, the executive who orchestrates the hunt, with icy corporate calm that finally cracks in the climax. Ike Barinholtz plays Staten Island as a paranoid loudmouth who suspects the truth too late. Emma Roberts, Ethan Suplee, and Wayne Duvall round out the prey, but the script kills most of them before they register as people.
Craig Zobel directs from a script by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, and the team treats sudden violence as the film’s main comic device. Characters who look like protagonists die in the first act before they finish a sentence. The gag works twice and then becomes the only joke the editing knows how to tell. Zobel stages the action cleanly, and the hand-to-hand fight that closes the film has real weight and choreography. The production design leans on broad visual irony, dressing its rural locations in red-state signifiers that function as set decoration for a thesis. The bluntness of the cutting matches the bluntness of the politics.
The Hunt has a sharp premise and a star who deserves a smarter film around her. Gilpin’s Crystal is a genuine creation. The movie that surrounds her mistakes provocation for satire and volume for wit. It wants to argue that everyone in this fight is a hypocrite, which is easy to assert and harder to dramatize. By the time the last fight ends, the film has spent its energy on shock and left its ideas where it found them, in the comment section.