‘Night of the Hunted’ is a horror thriller that follows Alice (Camille Rowe), a woman who stops at a remote gas station in the middle of the night and becomes trapped as she is targeted by an unseen assailant, determined to exact his grievances on her.
Opening on Alice as she calls with her husband, the protagonist is introduced as a dubious character, as it is revealed that she is planning to undergo fertility treatments whilst engaged in an affair with a colleague, John (Jeremy Scippio).
On their way back home, Alice and John stop to refuel, and it is revealed that their gas tank is leaking. Alice soon discovers the shop clerk to have been shot dead and she is soon fired upon herself. Taunted by the unseen sniper, Alice communicates with the killer via walkie-talkie.
The film leans towards uncomfortable suspense as Rowe’s Alice is injured and the young woman has to fight tooth and nail to pull herself back together, using the gas stop supplies to mend her injuries and try to get by the shooter and escape, successfully inducing a real sense of threat and raising genuine curiosity towards the shooters motivations.
Veering towards a more upfront approach and lacking in any kind of subtlety, the feature disperses with any attempts at mystery as it allows for the hidden assailant to keep taunting Alice through the walkie-talkie seemingly uninterrupted, going on multiple tirades on various contemporary social and political issues.
Touching on topics surrounding the bipartisan system, public shootings, inequity, lack of social and medical structures in the United States and conspiracy theories, the feature seems to want to address the multitude of sensitive contemporary issues affecting the average American citizen. Failing to deliver a focused opinion, the movie devolves into what could be considered the amalgam of the aforementioned objections in the form of incoherent ramblings that result in the issues being brought up, yet never explored.
Where the objective of the feature may have been to raise genuine concern for the apparent level of insanity of the current state of affairs, the film rather delivers a cat-and-mouse chase with Alice trying to outsmart the discontented sniper. Where genuine issues of concern are mentioned, namely that of mass shootings and political oppression, the villain absurdly proceeds to kill a number of individuals to the effect of undermining his own point.
Attempting to showcase the vast array of injustices that many may have to endure due to their social or economic status, or due to their political opinions, the shooter comes close to presenting his argument in an intelligible manner, which is unfortunately soon undercut by his tendency to switch to a different, unrelated topic, undercutting any through-line to his reasoning.
At one point suggesting the assailant may know Alice, the film toys with the idea of a targeted attack, which is also soon abandoned in favour of concluding on the though that the killer could have been motivated by a number of reasons.
Trying to cover many ideas and issues, ‘Night of the Hunted’ attempts to encapsulate the contemporary frustration of modern day America, raising many troublesome and precarious issues yet failing to genuinely engage in a coherent discussion about any of them. Initially delivering a tense chase thriller, the film fails to expand on its premise and falls flat as it runs low on current issues and ammo.
Score: 1/4
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