NIGHT OF THE HUNTED - Mark Reviews Movies

Night of the Hunted, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 19, 2023

As a thriller, Night of the Hunted holds up if one doesn't scrutinize it in any way. That's a tough ask of the screenplay by director Franck Khalfoun and Glen Freyer, though, because the majority of the movie is set at a single location—namely, a gas station in the middle of nowhere along a mostly vacant highway. Such a story is a challenge, to be sure, since it has to find new and different ways to maintain the suspense and momentum of the plot under tight restrictions. It also, though, has to ensure that its logic is airtight, because every character and action are put under a microscope on account of the limitations, too.

Forget all of that for a moment, though, because Khalfoun's movie is also attempting to be much more than a simple thriller about a woman trapped and under attack in a gas station. There's the attacker himself to consider here—a mysterious man, seemingly perched on a billboard across the street from the place, with a sniper rifle and a grudge. By its very setup, the script is tapping into an all-too common fear and apparently unending problem in this country: There are a lot of guns and too many people who are willing to use them for murder.

On one level, the movie doesn't need to dig into this notion, because it's right there on the surface and within the very fiber of this story. One can question whether or not using the horrific and ongoing trend of mass shootings in the United States as the foundation of a thriller is exploitative or even in good taste, but like the issue at hand, the movie exists as a fact. We have to reckon with the material on its own terms.

What's strange about the terms established by the filmmakers, though, is how much they invite discussion, debate, and critique of the underlying political and social issues at the center of this tale. This isn't just a movie about a mass shooter terrorizing and murdering innocent people without any clear motive or rationale. It's a story about pointing out that such people exist, could have a slew of what they see as motives for their actions, and will act upon those thoughts and feelings without a second thought or any remorse.

In the real world, we know this because it is a simple fact of living in this country. In the movie, we know it, because Khalfoun and Freyer give their fictional shooter a platform and a literally captive audience to make all of this points, as well as about a dozen others, clear.

Here, of course, is where the limitations of the setting collide with the movie's desire to be more than a mere thriller. As soon as our protagonist Alice (Camille Rowe) arrives inside the gas station's shop, there is nowhere else for her to go and nothing else for her to do but survive. She has some equipment with which to work and a few ways to evade the sniper, so it's not as if Alice is a passive figure in the story.

At a certain point, though, the screenwriters more or less transform her into one. It's an odd choice, considering that the movie establishes a few in-the-moment and long-term goals for Alice to accomplish in order to escape or get help. However, it makes much more sense, albeit in a wrongheaded way, once the sniper (Stasa Stanic) starts talking to Alice over a two-way radio.

Oh, does this guy talk and talk and talk some more. He surely has as much dialogue as Alice (if not more so), who's quickly established as a married pharmaceutical company executive on her way home from a conference with co-worker/lover John (Jeremy Scippio). Is her affair the reason, either directly or indirectly, for this stranger to want to kill her?

Is it because of her job and the products her company sells? Is it because the sniper has some far-right political ideology that, apart from one exception, has him targeting certain types of people? Is he just a murderer with an opportunity?

The question of the killer's motives is probably less interesting than any potential answer—which the movie never gives us, by the way. It does, though, give the villain of Night of the Hunted a chance to speak repeatedly and in detail about all of those possible motives and more, while also putting Alice in the position of trying to rationalize and empathize with him at certain points. Obviously, the filmmakers don't side with the guy, but in terms of the movie's existence as a thriller and as an examination of contemporary politics, letting this particular character talk so much is a misguided, unforced error.

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