The Hunt

The writer Richard Con­nell posit­ed humankind as the most dan­ger­ous game; the messy roll­out of The Hunt, a loose adap­ta­tion of his famed short sto­ry, would sug­gest that releas­ing movies can be a far more haz­ardous business.

The hor­ror-satire was slat­ed to open in late 2019, but a spate of pub­lic shoot­ings in the weeks lead­ing up sparked a con­ver­sa­tion about post­pone­ment, a debate con­clud­ed when the sit­ting Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States tweet­ed in oppo­si­tion to Craig Zobel’s film. Under the pre­tence of avoid­ing a brouha­ha, while in actu­al­i­ty plot­ting to raise one lat­er on down the line, Uni­ver­sal decid­ed to yank the film until things cooled off.

Now, view­ers can see for them­selves that there’s no there there, mere­ly an array of provo­ca­tions on which the film can’t ful­ly fol­low through. The hook per­tains to the demo­graph­ics of the hunters (“lib­er­al elites,” as the script goes) and the hunt­ed (“deplorables” from South­ern and Mid­west­ern regions) as they play a lethal game of hide and seek in a seclud­ed East­ern Euro­pean coun­try. Scriptwrit­ers Nick Cuse and Damon Lin­de­lof use head­lines to draw these bat­tle lines, pit­ting the Democ­rats’ nas­ti­est con­cept of Repub­li­cans against the Repub­li­cans’ nas­ti­est con­cept of Democrats.

After a pair of rel­a­tive­ly clever false stars, the pro­tag­o­nist role gets filled by Crys­tal, a prod­uct of the rur­al low­er class from her faux-ele­gant name all the way down. Though Bet­ty Gilpin avails her­self well, mak­ing expert use of her Ama­zon­ian stature and a face trained by an off-Broad­way upbring­ing to project expres­sion, she’s fight­ing the mate­r­i­al even hard­er than her pur­su­ing assas­sins. Still, she has the best go of bring­ing the broad stereo­type she’s been dealt to life, far bet­ter than the Alex Jones stand-in (Ethan Suplee) or the soror­i­ty girl sim­ply named ​“Yoga Pants” (Emma Roberts).

Could it be true that the bleed­ing-heart pro­gres­sives actu­al­ly crave real blood from real hearts in their pri­vate moments? Is it pos­si­ble that Red Staters aren’t all racist yokels? Is anyone’s con­cept of the two-par­ty divide so facile that demon­strat­ing oth­er­wise would come as a shock?

While they were fuss­ing over optics and pol­i­tics, the stu­dio heads should’ve been wor­ry­ing about the over­all sub­stan­dard qual­i­ty of their prod­uct, not as a dis­course object but as art. Its ideas about irrec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ence and America’s inten­si­fy­ing cul­ture wars might have been more effec­tive if they hadn’t been first run through a Google Trans­late engine con­vert­ing ​“Eng­lish” to ​“thought piece,” swap­ping out talk­ing for talk­ing points.

The expect­ed retort to that cri­tique would be that satir­i­cal char­ac­ters aren’t sup­posed to be real­is­tic, that they’re stand-ins for fac­tions of peo­ple or their ideas. If that’s the case, then the real prob­lem would be that the ideas can­not cohere into a greater the­sis. The dec­la­ra­tion that both sides have some bad behav­iour to answer for risks noth­ing, and fails to account for the vast dis­par­i­ties between the sins of the left and right.

It’s not hard to ges­ture to the whole of elec­toral dis­course right now and rea­son that some­thing, some­where has gone very wrong. But to write it off as mutu­al heels-dug-in enmi­ty – or worse, to cast the con­ser­v­a­tive ele­ment in the more flat­ter­ing light – pass­es over the meat of the subject.The film’s sec­ond round of pro­mo­tion, after it had shed its rep­u­ta­tion as just anoth­er genre pic­ture, bills it as ​“the most talked about movie of the year.” How curi­ous, then, that it doesn’t have much of any­thing to say.