Director Franck Khalfoun is responsible for one of my favorite remakes in recent history, Maniac (2012). Knowing the care he took to pay homage to one of my favorite genre films while also making it his own, showed me that knew what he was doing when it came to filmmaking. So when I saw his name attached to Night of the Hunted I jumped at the opportunity to check it out.
Pharmaceutical rep Alice (Camille Rowe) is picked up in the middle of the night from a hotel by her friend John (Jeremy Scippio) to head to an appointment for fertility treatments. Along the way they are pinned down at a remote gas station by a sociopathic sniper with a hidden agenda. While dodging bullets, trying to survive she’s desperately attempting to figure out exactly why he wants her dead.
There’s quite a bit to unpack in just the opening few scenes alone. The film opens with our view of a motel through the windshield of a vehicle. Military dog tags hanging from the rearview. We have Alice getting a phone call from her husband at 2am discussing fertility treatments and there seems to be a disconnect between the two, as if the relationship is on the rocks. During this we see that she is not alone in the room, there is an anonymous man sharing her bed. She slips out and hops in the car with her coworker John who seems to be an object of affection as well. Already you can kind of feel where this headed once she’s trapped in the gas station. Could the sniper be a jilted lover? But no, the viewer is thrown a curve ball once we find out that the gunman is a fringe, conspiracy-driven nut spouting buzzwords pulled directly from the headlines of the past few years. January 6th, vaccine mandates, evil pharmaceutical companies, 5g microchips and the like, feels like Khalfoun pulled his inspiration for the character directly from the Fox News headlines.
I really liked the tension Khalfoun was able to create here. He was able to draw you into the situation and put you in Alice’s shoes. The helpless feeling of being trapped in one location with a crazed gunman just out of sight and not knowing exactly where the shots are coming from. The few random people that could rescue you are gunned down before they even have a chance. A billboard proclaiming “GODISNOWHERE” towering over. There is literally no hope and the viewer feels that. It’s palpable. My only real issue with this film is the heavy-handedness of the shooter’s motives. I understand it’s a time capsule of the headline issues of 2020 to the present day. An outsider’s view of American politics, of the right vs the left, woke vs red pill-ers but it ended up feeling like a parody of what I thought could have been a great premise for a movie. I felt that Alice’s character had enough going on to fuel the shooter’s motive without making it a current event. Infidelity is a timeless trope and wouldn’t have made this something that could be watchable at any time without drawing the viewer back to the events of the past few years.
That being said, I enjoyed the movie even with the issues I had. Khalfoun really knows how to create a tense moment and a bleak feeling of helplessness. I just wish he would have taken a different route and not confined this to a specific time frame. For me, that limits the rewatchability. But I will say it’s worth the watch at least once. Night of the Hunted will be available on Shudder October 20th.
