Hunter Hunter

It's been a tough 10 months. We've relied on films, TV, books, music and games to cheer us up but it's an uphill struggle to say the least. It's going to take something absolutely joyous to really get us out of this slump. Hunter Hunter isn't that something. In fact Hunter Hunter is the kind of film that may very well drive you over the edge. It's a well made and well performed horror but fuck me...... that ending.....that ending would ruin your year.

The Mersault's are living a hard life. Mother, father and daughter right on the edge of a harsh, brutal Canadian wilderness. Father Joe (Devon Sawa) is a hunter who's traps catch the wildlife that mother Anne (Camille Sullivan) sells on her rare sojourns into town. He's raising daughter Renee (Summer Howell) in the ways of the hunter but Anne wants out. Life is just too hard and the past winter has been particularly miserable as a lone wolf is eating everything that Joe traps. On one fateful trip into the woods to kill the wolf Joe strumbles across something horrifying and realises the most dangerous animal in the wild isn't on four legs but on two.

Writer/Director Shawn Linden 2020 film is horror in it's truest form. There's no respite here, there's very little humour to smooth the edges, it starts in tension and ends in madness with a lingering final image that will hang around for an age. From the off you know you won't be having a good time here, with an almost unrecognisable Sawa's stubborn need to live life by his rules putting his family in danger. He obviously cares for them but not enough to do right by them and it's his determination to take on the wolf that really puts them in the way of danger. At it's heart Hunter Hunter is about men's primal need to do what suits them and screw everyone else.

It's one of those films that's best to go into cold. Small things foreshadow what's coming but little will prepare you for that climax. It's disgusting, vicious, upsetting stuff. There's no catharsis, no satisfaction, no backstory or explanation. After this you'll never go in the woods again. Climax aside there's moments that really chill you, a garden seat in a circle of terror and the implication of what it means, the look on a cops face, the realisation that life as you know it has finished, the fear of being alone in the wild. It's great to see Sawa onscreen in horrors again but this one is as far removed from the film, Idle Hands, that made him famous as is humanly possible. But as Anne Camille Sullivan steals the show here. She's living a life she's not suited too, she's too kind for frontier life but come the end she's as primal as anything lurking beneath that canopy of trees. *Shudder*

Hunter Hunter is streaming online now. If you do decide to watch it have something soft and fluffy to watch directly afterwards. You'll need it.