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The Night of the Hunted Review
Image Credit: Troy Harvey/Shudder
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When you make it your personal mission to watch at least 100 new releases movies over the course of a year, you have to accept they won’t all–they CAN’T all–be big budget theatrical releases. So you–or I in this case, I mean this is about me, let’s not be coy–end up watching a lot of movies released exclusively on various streaming services. A lot of them particularly lower budget oriented like Shudder or Tubi or FreeVee.
Sometimes, these selections really hit! Sometimes… they really don’t (see: uh, that same link over there). Already this year, I’ve seen a pretty big discrepancy between the great (I have about seven straight-to-streamers in my current Top Twenty Films of 2023) and the abhorrent (these of which make up a whopping seventeen of my Bottom Twenty on the year).
What you almost never expect are the rare streaming offerings that fit into the middle… the “Just fine” territory, as it were. You kind of get around to expecting either a hidden gem or an underwhelming, undercooked outing. So I personally have a hard time weighing the ones that land in the nebulous gray area in between. I’m left torn between feeling that I got more than I could have statistically bargained for, but also feeling like I might have wanted something more memorable. A lot of times with these movies, they have a lot ofd fluidity on my rankings as the year marches on and I do my sliding adjustments.
The Night Of The Hunted is a new release to Shudder starring Camille Rowe as Alice, a woman we see early on is having an affair with a coworker while at a convention away from her husband. She and her husband are working on conceiving, and Alice and her coworker head out of their hotel in the wee hours of the morning to get her home. They soon realize they need to get gas despite the coworker swearing he filled up the night before, so they stop at a 24 hour gas station.
While John fills up the tank, Alice heads inside to get coffee and gum, but there is no one to check her out. She leaves a ten dollar bill at the register and heads out to the car… when a sniper shot goes right through her arm!
Alice finds a walkie talkie on the counter of the gas station store and hears a man’s voice claiming to belong to the husband of the woman who worked at the store (Alice finds her dead body behind the counter), but the voice on the other end relatively quickly reveals himself to be her hidden assailant after he kills John.
And so the night moves on from there, with Alice trying to survive the sniper and find out why he is targeting her. In addition to her coworker, other early morning travelers eventually make their way to the station, but… it typically ends poorly for them.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ I really enjoy a good single-setting thriller where a hero is trapped somewhere, forced to confront their personal issues that mirror the situation in which they find themselves, and have to figure out a way to survive. And this film delivers in that regard. It’s hardly the first Victim Vs Sniper flick ever made, but it works the suffocating, claustrophobic formula really well. Alice certainly seems doomed, but nothing here is hopeless. Survival certainly seems plausible for her, so the flick has the best of both worlds: high tension, but also believability that an escape doesn’t have to be strictly screenwriter-ordained.
+ Camille Rowe is tasked with carrying the movie on her shoulders, and she is in just about every single scene. She performs admirably. Her pain–both mental and physical–is expressed realistically. You see right away that she is obviously a flawed character due to her affair, but the movie also gets you on her side quickly due to the dire circumstances in which she finds herself.
Things get a little wiggier later when a political element to the attack is teased and then a third character is added, but that’s not Ms. Rowe’s fault, nor does it hinder her performance. But those items said said…
– The movie takes some WEIRD political turns when we start moving into the rationale of why the killer is targeting Alice. It tries to stay ambiguous enough, with the killer at the end even asking her which of his various reasons he gave her she thinks is true, but it really strongly seems to hint at one in particular, and it’s just… look, I’m on the protagonist’s side in the grand scheme of things, but it leads to the movie getting a little weirdly socially preachy.
When you are working with a low-budget, high-suspense thriller, suddenly throwing in political axes to grind as a screenwriter is kind of shocking to the viewer. If your life and identity revolve around your political leanings, you will either love or despise where The Night Of The Hunted goes. But for 90% of the audience, it just becomes a bit of a “Wait, what now?” situation.
– While the movie has spent its first seventy minutes or so taking a fault character and making you feel for her successfully, everything seems to be going along great. Some other passers-by get involved, they die, and we keep going with Alice vs her attacker.
But then very late, The Night Of The Hunted throws a kid into the mix, and it’s a bit… cheap. Like the flick thought that in case we weren’t ENTIRELY on Alice’s side, it better end up giving her a child to protect! It’s wildly unnecessary. But it does give us the eeriest performance of “Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed” that we’re ever likely to see, so… that’s that, I guess.
