Night of the Hunted (2023) – Sniper Terror Butts Heads with Political Bluntness (Review)

Shudder is the premium horror streaming service – for now – and you’d expect their acquisitions and original movies to reflect that status. If a Shudder Original isn’t a horror movie, it will at least have some tangential connection. Not to be confused with the Jean Rollin movie of the same name, Night of the Hunted is a funny proposition when comparing it to the canon of Shudder originals – purely because it’s used as a political vehicle first, and contained horror second.

Directed by Franck Khalfoun (2012’s Maniac), and co-written by Rubén Ávila Calvo & Glen Freyer (along with Khalfoun), Night of the Hunted is a simple tale of Alice (Camille Rowe, The Deep House), a young woman besieged in a roadside petrol station by a mysterious sniper, who hails it with bullets. As the bodies pile up, she has to figure out who the hidden gunman is before her attacker decides to end things. While unquestionably similar to Phone Booth (Schumacher, 2002), and Downrange (Kitamura, 2017), Khalfoun’s movie differs by taking place at night in the middle of nowhere, and, vitally, everything is in service of the politics.

Hidden in plain sight near a “godisnowhere” sign on an overlooking hill, a disembodied voice on a radio (Stasa Stanic), poses all manner of problematic, ideological quandaries and conspiracy theories to Alice – whose day job is running the social media for a big pharma organisation. From the idea that injections and inoculations caused the deaths of countless people, the shunning of people with different perspectives by mainstream society, and the weaponization of modern feminism, to the treatment of Military personnel – both at home and abroad, and more. Meanwhile, Alice counters by talking about the autonomy of her body, and the toxic environment that creates people like the man killing innocent people instead of dealing with his real problems. It’s worth pointing out that we never find out who this mysterious killer is, and his specific call to arms left purposesfully ambiguous

That being said, the movie does build to an interesting conclusion that sees both America’s political right and left do little more than damage the next generation. It’s about as far from subtle as you can get, but of all the potential resolutions Khalfoun and co could arrive at, this is one of the more palatable. Night of the Hunted is a movie that addresses the state of the nation through well-acted monologues that struggle to rise above being speed traps for an otherwise tense, contained exercise in real-life terror.

The actual genre-work is on stronger footing, with the cinematographer (Steeven Petitteville), the director, the composer (Mathieu Carratier), and the set decoration, production and art design team collaborating beautifully to create a palpable sense of dread in the wide open space that surrounds Alice. One sequence sees one of the many patrons making it inside the shop just as the sniper becomes quiet – adding a sense of mystery about the stranger and whether or not they are the killer. Although this a very talky movie, when gunshots tear through the absolute darkness of night, bloody flesh and sinew, the silences become a distressing counterpoint to the visual and aural assault. We do get a considerable bit of gore, on that note – from gun wounds of varying nastiness to a gruesome shot of a head being popped like a melon under an industrial machinery.

This is arguably Khalfoun’s best movie since his Elijah Wood fronted remake of Maniac, which was also produced by Alexandre Aja. That being said, the success of Night of the Hunted comes down to how much you can stomach the surface-level political discourse, as those conversations about the plight of modern America simply overwhelm Shudder’s latest. As any long term genre fan will agree, big issues are better tackled from afar using sly subtext and genre machinations, so if there was a little Romero subversiveness in this mix, we could’ve been cooking.

Rob’s Archive – Night of the Hunted