The Hunt

Thus Spake Zaroff’s Story

The Hunt
2020 USA Directed by Craig Zobel
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight spoilers.

The Hunt is yet another in a long line of cinematic ‘adaptations’ of The Hounds Of Zaroff (aka The Most Dangerous Game)... heck, even Jess Franco made a version of it at one point (reviewed by me here). It even turned up as a sub-plot in The Purge: Anarchy (reviewed here). The classic story is, of course, that ‘the most dangerous game’ for hunting are human beings. Single people are usually hunted for sport in a remote setting like an island in these adaptations. For this latest spin on the classic tale, we have multiple quarry and a setting in a remote country.

I’ve been wanting to see this movie since I saw a trailer for it last year, shortly before the film got rescheduled from an August 2019 release due to a mass shooting in America. It’s finally now in cinemas and, I have to say, coming from the Blumhouse studios, I was expecting a somewhat competent and maybe slightly edgy action thriller.... well, I have to say that I got so much more. This is a brilliantly entertaining film although, I should probably warn you that it’s also quite brutal and gory, which some of us might argue it kind of needs to be when treating this subject matter for modern times.

I knew I was going to be in for more than the average action flick when I realised the film includes a pig called Orwell and a character referred to as Snowball. There’s very much a satirical edge to this tale of a cadre of rich people hunting down ‘undesirables’... so much more than at first meets the eye here and it’s really not just a run, shoot kill movie, although on the surface that’s exactly what it is.

The opening sequence was a bit problematic for me since it was so obvious what was going to happen, when one of the drugged ‘targets’ wakes up before he is supposed to. I even knew the doctor was probably going to ask to borrow a pen to do what he does in this opening and... yeah, I was disappointed that you could see exactly where this was going.

After this, though, the film smartens itself up considerably and we have one of those situations where the main protagonist doesn’t even come into the film properly for a bit. The first 20 minutes or so is of the majority of the human fodder in the movie being killed in, it has to be said, some unexpectedly brutal ways and it reminded me of fixating on the Janet Leigh character in Hitchcock’s Psycho before she is killed off and you have no idea of who the main protagonist really is anymore. The start of this movie is just like that where, every time you are encouraged by the director to latch onto a ‘main character’, they’re taken out in some spectacularly bloody manner. It’s a nice way of playing it and it also gives the audience some impression of what to expect in terms of the efficiency of this rich bunch of killers. It also, of course, means you can never be sure just who is going to be next on the list of deaths.

And then, after a scene at a gas station where a particularly satirical and violent conflict has just played out, we get the real protagonist of the movie turning up... Crystal, played in an astonishingly hypnotic performance by an actress I’d not heard of before called Betty Gilpin. She’s the survivor of the group of targets having served time in the military at some point and she’s the one who pretty much does all the thinking throughout the movie, as she uncovers various ‘rich antagonists in disguise’ while the story progresses. Also, I really got behind this actress because the way she plays the character with some wildly exaggerated expressions is just perfect and, often, quite funny. The way she is written and performed as the ‘dumb redneck’ who turns out to be the smartest one in the room is pretty cool and a nice step up from some of the Hollywood stereotypes we’ve been living with for the last 100 or so years.

My only real problem with it was the final reveal of the villain. There’s an element of self fulfilling prophecy about the set up of the mechanics in motion to make The Hunt a thing in this world and I’m not going to say anything about that because this, perhaps unnecessary information, could be considered a bit of a spoiler for some. I will give away the bizarre villain reveal though because it’s totally stupid and pointless. All through the film there is a ‘mystery character’. She’s deliberately hidden from the camera and we only see the back of her head... it’s a bit like looking at Blofeld in the early bond movies where all you would see was the back of a head and some hands stroking a cat to denote the important status of this character. When we finally see her for the third act she’s revealed as... Hilary Swank. But we knew this already right? She has prominent billing doesn’t she? So... everybody knows Hilary Swank is in the movie and her face hasn’t been on screen for the first two thirds so... this reveal is not hard to guess now, is it?. That’s my one real... huh?... moment of the film. Why they bothered to hide her face when everyone knew she was in it.

Anyway, when Betty Gilpin’s character has killed pretty much everyone else off and she’s on her own, she finds the compound of Swank’s character and it’s not long before these two are indulging in a lethal, up close and personal fight. I’m pretty sure the filmmakers are going for a scene reminiscent of the opening fight between Uma Thurman and Vivica A Fox in Kill Bill Volume 1 in intensity and... well it doesn’t really top or match up to that scene to be fair but it does get a lot more in your face than most movies do these days, it has to be said.

And that’s me more or less done on The Hunt, other than to say I could stand watching this a few more times and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for a Blu Ray release when the time comes. It’s a nice version of The Hounds Of Zaroff with a certain intelligence behind the characters and their perceptions of a certain ‘class’ of people, is beautifully acted (great seeing Ethan Suplee again), has some brilliantly choreographed and ferociously well edited action sequences, a stand-out turn from the person who does eventually turn out to be the main protagonist and, as it turns out, a really nice post-denouement end scene that also elevates the main character, in my opinion.

If you’re into action cinema, make sure you see this one... it’s a well put together and surprisingly rewarding stand out of the genre.

Compliance

Stripping Yarns

Compliance
USA 2012
Directed by Craig Zobel
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: This review reveals things right from the outset that some people are going to feel are big spoilers.

Compliance is a film I might not have seen had it not been for the fantastic young lady who picked it out as our cinema viewing this week. As it turns out, I was pretty happy with the choice and the style of film-making on display but it’s certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea... including, as it happens, my multiplex companion who chose it from the array of movies on Cineworld’s website.

It's a movie which pulls you into a situation using a clever array of shot types and edits which are skillfully used to set up mini chapters and highlight certain moments for the viewer. It pretty much has no story and almost everything that happens in the film is either present or implied in the trailer. The film is all set during one night in a “Chickwich” fast food “restaurant” and tells of a group of people who are prank called and become complicit through that very long phone call, to the will of somebody pretending to be a police officer and who gets some of the employees in the restaurant to strip-search a young girl and enforce humiliating and provocative sexual acts on her before it is realised, after what must be many hours, that they have become accessories to a sexual crime.

The film is based on true events and it’s all geared up to get you to ask questions about how far these people go, why do they fall in line with an authority figure rather then start to question, a hell of a lot earlier, the things they are being told to do... and where is it that the point comes between being a victim and being an antagonist.

The male character who is called in to the restaurant to spank and then receive a highly charged sexual act from the true, young, female victim of this crime is a problem issue. He comes off in the general public’s mind, in the movie, as kind of a rapist... but the pressure he is under to assist in something which he ultimately knows must be wrong, and the fact that he has already been drinking away some of the night and is ever so slightly impaired in his thinking because of this, muddies the issue somewhat and also gives you a sense of him being as much of a victim as some of the other people in this drama.

Again, it’s all about being aware of the gravity of events and actions and being able to determine, for yourself as an individual, where such lines are crossed. And the thing about that is... everybody is different. Everybody is adhering to their own variation and spin offs an objective value system which, frankly, is never ever going to be perceived at anything other than a subjective level, and this plays into the rationale behind the events depicted in the film and certainly gives you something to talk about after the lights go up.

The performances, as you would expect with this kind of movie, are absolutely flawless and brilliant. It’s the kind of ensemble piece that independently produced US films do so well and the acting talent is helped considerably by the way the movie is shot, edited and lit. This is a piece which is designed to make you feel uncomfortable and, from what I could see of the audience and their nervous laughter in some scenes, this seems to have worked well... I think my own problem with this is I am so jaded and aware of the tricks the director is going to use to produce this kind of effect, after years of movies, that it becomes a little blunted on me to a certain extent.

Starting off with some shortish, completely static shots edited together to build up a series of establishing shots (rather than go for the obvious, long master shot to open chapters), this builds up a certain tension within the audience because the viewer is conditioned to experience release on those kinds of long shots and this film deliberately doesn’t have very many of them. It’s intense and claustrophobic and this isn’t just because the action takes place in just a couple of rooms for the most part. It’s because the director slyly shies away from allowing much of a release from the medium and close up shots throughout the course of the movie. In fact, from the moment I first saw those opening, static shots cut together, I thought of Sergei Eisenstein and his theory of the way you edit films, from his stance back in the early part of the 20th Century at the dawn of cinema, and they are kinda put together like something you might see in one of his early, Soviet propaganda works in some ways. Also, these shot sequences are very much like the quick-edit transition sequences of the early works of Darren Aronofsky... although a fair bit slower, actually, and without the heavy sound/musical punctuation.

The shots in between these little set ups are a lot longer and rely a lot on hand held, slightly moving camera to create a sense of cinema-verite which is another neat trick because, when the film gets to a place where the director really wants to highlight a point... he’ll either stop the camera dead which goes directly into the subconscious as a cinematic punctuation mark, or zoom or cut to a tighter version of that shot to lend an emphasis to it (a technique which has almost been done to death in various well-shot US science-fiction TV shows over the last ten years).

There’s also an interesting choice of shots along the way which, despite the implied documentary leanings of the “camera as recorder” set up, show an underlying sense of artistic expression which all makes for a fairly effective cocktail of styles. The enforced fellatio scene, for example, is technically off shot and implied by the tell tale signs of stress implicit in performing such acts in a non-consensual environment... and as a result, the audience naturally fill in the blanks with their own imagination and it becomes a little more raw and shocking than it would have been if the director had just recorded the graphic act on film.

There’s also a surprising sense of humour present in occasional scenes which are less implicit, but still there... such as one of the waitresses paraphrasing an obvious line of dialogue from Kevin Smith’s Clerks which made me stifle a giggle (stifle because it seemed to somehow bypass the rest of the audience, who presumably didn’t pick up on it). Although this slight underlying humour, which to be fair is very minimal, does nothing to detract from the fact that there are very few truly sympathetic characters in the mix... everybody seems to be carrying around a little piece of damage which  makes for less of a connection with many of the characters involved.

The sound design and use of music is also quite intense and ultimately brilliant. The score is very quiet and subtle in most sequences. Bearing in mind the “camera-eye” style of filming, I was surprised the director chose to have any music in there at all, but it’s actually very effective and for the most part lurks within the subconscious before being allowed to overpower the soundtrack in some key moments. It perfectly matches the visuals and the rest of the foley and makes for an enthralling combination.

So yeah, I guess my verdict is in on this one. Compliance is a somewhat challenging but extremely well made piece of cinema, which perhaps doesn’t get as raw or confrontational as it could, but delivers a highly competent and classic cinematic approach to subject manner which many would not find to their taste. If you’re a fan of the motion picture as art, you will probably appreciate the level of craftsmanship in this film... although it’s not the most entertaining piece of drama out there. Cineastes will certainly enjoy the taste and restraint shown in this one while people who are not used to this kind of approach to a subject may find themselves less than enamoured of it.

One thing I do know for sure... while I was okay with the movie in general... it’s certainly not the best “date movie”.