Mark Reviews Movies: HUNT HER, KILL HER

Hunt Her, Kill Her, Welcome Villain Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 1, 2023

There's such simplicity to the premise and execution of Hunt Her, Kill Her that it's both admirable and frustrating. The setup sees a young single mother terrorized on her first night of working the graveyard shift at a factory. Yes, this group of men is hunting her, because they have every intention of killing her. It's as uncomplicated as that.

All of this, then, is very little more than an excuse for an extended chase, battle of wits, and/or game of cat-and-mouse, depending on the specific situation at hand at the night progresses. Given the limited setting, there aren't many specific situations in which Karen (Natalie Terrazzino) can find herself.

The movie's success or failure all comes down to how directors Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen orchestrate the action, taking advantage of the location's potential and keeping us distracted from how repetitive the whole scheme of the plot is. In general, the endeavor mostly works, but Swinson's screenplay and the staging of certain beats prevent us from becoming as invested in this as anything more than an exercise.

One of the more obvious positives of the movie is that our protagonist is perfectly ordinary. She has no training or set of skills that could help her in a scenario such as this one, except for a broad understanding of the layout of the place. Karen receives a quick introduction to her job of cleaning up the factory alone, starts working, and soon discovers that someone is wandering around the place.

It's more than one person, though, and Karen quickly finds herself pursued by three, then four, and then five men wearing masks and wielding blades. She has to run, hide, and, eventually, do some subtraction to that number of pursuers.

The filmmakers have Karen scurry across long stretches of floor, hang from the side of platforms, crawl through giant shelves holding large boxes, and hide inside and under an assortment of things, from barrels to tables. To its credit, the movie is always moving or establishing the potential for sudden movement in some way, and a lot of the immediate obstacles facing Karen make plain sense, such as when her belt becomes caught on a metal platform just as one of her pursuers notices her.

There's just a bit too much convenience and contrivance in the behavior of these foes, whose motive does give the action some real-world heft without coming across as too exploitative. They repeatedly could put a quick end to the chase by simply looking slightly in the one direction they don't, and at times, they seem to have an extrasensory awareness of where Karen is, while somehow failing to notice the obvious at others. A movie such as Hunt Her, Kill Her needs to be as tight in its logic and logistics as it is in its premise, and this one isn't quite up to that task.

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