"Hunted" mixes "Little Red Riding Hood" and every female-fronted survival thriller with brutally effective results

Hunted (2021)

On the running heels of John Hyams’ quietly released but tautly composed 2020 survival thriller “Alone,” “Hunted” still holds its own as a contempo spin on “Little Red Riding Hood” and a ferocious rallying cry with “I Spit on Your Grave” tendencies. Despite even more familiarity to other films—“Revenge,” “Killing Ground,” and “Rust Creek”—this one is helmed with a raw, visceral, later-impressionistic style and a grim, sometimes-mythological tone by French filmmaker and comic artist Vincent Paronnaud (who co-directed 2007’s “Persepolis”). The two tonal modes do not always click, but as a primal, fat-free chase thriller with folkloric ambitions, “Hunted” is brutally effective.

Ending her workday by being told she needs to be tougher, construction supervisor Eve (Lucie Debay) proceeds to relax, only to be bombarded by texts from her boyfriend. She decides to go out, leaving her phone. At a club, Eve orders herself a mojito before being approached by a handsome man (Arieh Worthalter), who charms her enough to dance. Once they go to his car to make out, the stranger’s timid accomplice (Ciaran O’Brien) gets in the driver’s seat and starts driving. As it turns out, the handsome man is a psychotic creep with a camcorder in hand and a hobby for making snuff films. When the tormentors throw her in the trunk and a freak car accident near the forest gives the outmatched Eve time to escape, the chase is on. Who will be hunting who?

If you feel like you have seen “Hunted” before, writer-director Vincent Paronnaud and co-writer Léa Pernollet make their retelling fresh and strange with a fable flourish. For one, Eve does don a red riding hood, but that’s not the last of the fairy tale allusions. Framed as a campfire tale that a mother (Simone Milsdochter) tells her 8-year-old son (Vladimir Ryelandt), who will both turn up later in the story proper, the film begins with shadow-puppet animation and uses nature as a motif from there. A wild boar standing in the middle of the road causes the car accident that allows for Eve’s trunk escape. When Eve is running for her life in the wilderness, nature is on her side. It intervenes in the form of a crow that attacks the man or a frog that the man vomits up. As the story-spinning mother tells her son and us, the forest is “a defender of the innocent” and “the company of wolves is better than that of men.” A wolf-like dog might even show up at some point. Obvious and heavy-handed or not, the symbolism is a choice and a swing to be admired.

Lucie Debay is a fierce force of nature as Eve, who may not be fully explored as a character, but her arc is a compelling one. Eve already comes across as a smart woman who may avoid confrontation, but she has boundaries and instincts. Scared to death and victimized, Eve becomes more enraged, unbridled, and dead set on revenge once adapting to the forest. Eve is like a phoenix rising from the ashes, complete with a face bathed in blue war paint from passing a group of paintballers in the forest. Billed only as “The Guy” rather than Big Bad Wolf, Arie Worthalter gets that creepy/smarmy/charismatic mixture right as a truly psychotic P.O.S. who can turn the charm on and off. Through his ruggedly handsome looks, there lies an unpredictability not unlike the many bad guys Sean Bean has essayed, and Worthalter is just unsettling throughout. Like Eve, “Guy” is an archetype, too, but a human monster who’s hard to pin down and might be using his misogyny as a mask for harbored homosexuality (as when he forces his weaselly accomplice to kiss him while driving).

The setup of “Hunted” is tightly wound enough to build a queasy feeling in the pit of one’s stomach. Once the action turns to the forest, director Vincent Paronnaud does not skimp on general savagery and a few intensely unforgiving shocks, particularly one gnarly moment involving an arrow around a campsite. As Eve becomes feral and even more fueled by her rage, the film itself becomes more frenzied and stylized, closer to loony, over-the-top pulp that pops with color and propels with Olivier Bernet’s score. An insanely protracted final showdown between Eve and her kidnapper from the forest to a cornfield to a new home construction site nearly rivals the awesomely destructive knock-down, drag-out kitchen fight in 2020’s “The Hunt.” Even if it doesn’t consistently weigh its heightened magic-realism leanings, “Hunted” is a ruthlessly harrowing fight for survival and a punch in the gonads. 

Grade: B -

Shudder released “Hunted” (87 min.) to their streaming service on January 14, 2021.