The Hunt (2020): Movie Review

The Hunt (2020) feels like an idea someone came up with while drunk, given a Blumhouse budget and then marketed on the tide of fake controversy. The last point is especially ironic with the movie’s twist in mind. When the movie’s trailer came out, it felt really out-of-nowhere and yet the movie kept calling itself the most controversial film of the year. Some confidence.

This movie’s commercial success, much like any other Blumhouse project, is guaranteed because of its low budget. But in terms of its short-lived popularity, The Hunt seems to have created its own popularity. This is impressive but also quite off-putting. Isn’t it strange that nowadays, you can create something really fake and have it become a real thing in the eyes of others?

(Image credit: The New York Times)

In any case, this movie is about a group of “rednecks” and “hicks” who have been captured by a bunch of rich people. They were let off in an open area where they were hunted. This is all the film’s marketing gives us, and it seems like they’re trying to lean into the contentious political climate in the United States.

The movie does this as well. A lot of the dialogue in this film references the buzzwords and popular phrases you would find in contemporary political discourses. There is the kind of left-right division signposted by words like “comrades” and references to books like Animal Farm. There are words and phrases that you would find on the internet like “liberal elites” and “snowflakes”. There are also other contemporary issues like Climate Change and the Second Amendment. They’re all here, this movie is explicitly political.

Because of the mixture of horror and comedy, you get a sense that the movie is a satire. But for most of the film, you don’t really understand what they’re trying to say exactly. The thing about good satire is that while it isn’t usually clear from the outset, there is always a clear thread or theme that you can more or less follow. It also mimics the structure of the target genre only to deconstruct it. Take Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) for an example. That movie is a satire of a tense political thriller, but the tension is always undercut by absurd things. And since this is a war movie, we immediately grasp the thread: this movie is making the tense funny, and since the tense stuff is war, it is in effect revealing the absurdity of war.

(Image credit: Fandango)

The Hunt satirises a slasher-horror movie, but that says very little about what the movie is actually about. How does undercutting the horror of this situation make it any form of commentary? The closest we can think of is maybe it’s trying to say that our political discourse has become self-serious yet stupid. But again, if they’re trying to say that the redneck vs. liberal killing spree in the film is a reflection of current political discourse, then that’s already a satire in itself. It’s equating what is supposed to be a civil discourse to a massacre. So why add another layer of comedy?

The movie that nails this whole taking the political climate of a country and then dilating it into a slasher flick would be Battle Royale (2000). Undisputed. Battle Royale can be seen as comedic but it is comedic because of the situation. The Hunt on the other hand tries to hammer in the comedy in every moment possible. This meant most of the characters you meet felt like cartoons. The comedy ends up exaggerating the characters and creating cognitive dissonance. Tense scenes become weird because they are suddenly undercut by a joke. The end result is confusion.

Battle Royale (2000)

(Image credit: Phoenix Leicester)

Most of the performances in this movie are quite poor. They are poor mainly because they are exaggerated to fit the comedic parts. You feel like most of these actors are in a state of confusion, not sure how they’re supposed to act because they’re not sure what kind of movie they’re in. There are a few good actors in here, one, in particular, is good enough you will probably notice it easily. I mean, you are in a sea of really bad performances… But even that one performance has a lot of moments that stand out as being odd. It’s odd in the sense that it does not look like the actor/actress intentionally did what they did. It just feels like the director explicitly asked for it.

The directing is unfocused. There are moments that should’ve been cut out entirely from the film. There are even entire acts that don't seem to function in the narrative as a whole. There are moments that would have been good character building or good world-building that was removed. The only function most of the scenes in this film serve, aside from adding political references and making jokes, is to shock. Hence the movie feels like a string of really bad Family Guy cutaway gags.

Early on in the film, they make a very specific choice to do something, just to kind of catch the audience off guard. At first, it sort of worked? But they did it more than a few times. And now we end up with something that’s overdone. And annoying. The movie then settles into a more tolerable pattern, but it is frequently stopped by moments that felt, frankly speaking, unnecessary and dumb. The closest thing to a redeeming moment came towards the end. There was one particular exchange that not only spoke to the theme of the film but also actually adds to the conversation of the political discourse.

Sadly, what is supposed to be a plus point for the film ended up highlighting the biggest issue with The Hunt, which is that these “wise” takeaways felt a lot more like something your stoned friend would say one night and have no recollection of the next morning. It doesn’t add much to the political discourse. In fact, it’s a tactic of shocking, provoking and being stupid for no good reason that might, in turn, be detrimental to the overall political discourse.

If not for anything, it’s just a really bad satire.