French comics creator and filmmaker Vincent Paronnaud is best known internationally for the two films he co-directed with Marjane Satrapi, the adaptations of her graphic novels Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011), which take whimsical approaches to personal and political material. But there’s nothing whimsical about Paronnaud’s English-language debut, the brutal horror movie Hunted. Paronnaud’s background in comics is evident in the film’s bold style, but the storytelling gets away from him, turning a straightforward chase movie into an impressionistic muddle.
Hunted begins with a story around a campfire, told from a mother to a son, about the animals of a forest protecting an innocent young woman from dangerous men. Paronnaud animates the story in a sort of shadow-puppet style, setting up a fairy tale-like atmosphere that he doesn’t quite follow through on. The mother telling the story talks about “the company of wolves,” referencing the title of Neil Jordan’s 1984 fairy-tale horror reimagining, and the forest setting and dark tone promise something like Oz Perkins’ underrated Gretel & Hansel from last year.
Instead, the story shifts to something more crude and modern, offering up some basic character details about protagonist Eve (Lucie Debay) before plunging her into a nightmare of kidnapping and attempted rape. Eve is a French woman in an unnamed foreign country (Hunted was shot in Belgium, although everyone speaks English), supervising a construction project for a condescending boss who threatens to replace her with a male colleague. She seems to have some vague drama with a boyfriend back home, who keeps sending her urgent text messages that she ignores.
Instead, she leaves her hotel room (leaving her cell phone behind) for a local bar, where she meets a handsome, charming stranger (Arieh Worthalter) who fends off a vulgar, pushy man incessantly hitting on Eve. But this man (credited only as “the guy”) isn’t her savior. They dance and flirt and head to his car to make out, and then his attitude shifts suddenly. Another man (Ciaran O’Brien) gets in the car and starts driving them out of town toward the secluded wilderness. The men taunt and toy with Eve, briefly letting her go before abducting her again as she attempts to solicit help from a convenience store clerk.
Paronnaud inserts clips of videos that the guy has made of previous victims, who are tied up, raped and tortured, and Worthalter gives the guy a seething, unpredictable menace that makes it clear how much danger Eve is in. The guy even turns on his own accomplice when the other man isn’t sufficiently tough and ruthless. Eve is pointedly dressed in a red hoodie, and as the characters enter into the woods from the opening prologue, it seems like actual wolves may be coming to save her from this metaphorical big bad wolf.
But that’s not quite what happens. The car crashes and Eve escapes, running through the woods as the guy pursues her. But the fairy tale aspect of the story doesn’t really come together, and the middle of the movie is just Eve running and hiding while the guy chases after her. There’s a primal energy to that simple set-up, and that stretch of the movie is where it shines, as Debay embodies Eve’s transformation from frustrated and powerless into enraged and vengeful. But there’s little sense of where this inner strength comes from, and the guy is even more of a cipher than Eve. They’re more archetypes than characters, which fits with the fairy tale structure but makes it hard to care about them in a concrete way.
Eventually, the mother and son from the prologue return, although they make less of an impact on the story than their initial introduction would indicate. As Eve and the guy continue to evade and confront each other, Hunted’s final act devolves into near-total abstraction, losing any sense of character or purpose or geography. The opening suggests a story about the timeless pull of the forest, but as the characters keep running, they somehow end up in a corn field, and then at a construction site, although by that point it’s tough to tell what’s meant to be real and what’s merely symbolic.
If Paronnaud had presented an entirely surreal, fantastical film from the beginning, it would be easier to handle that shift, but most of Eve’s story is depicted as realistic, if heightened. The lack of character detail distances the audience from the action, and it’s tough to invest in Eve’s eventual revenge. There have been quite a few stylized takes on the rape-revenge story in recent years, from Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge to Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, and those movies have a stronger handle on their perspectives than Paronnaud does with Hunted. Paronnaud’s comics background serves him well from a visual standpoint, but his narrative and character development fall short, leaving Hunted a mostly empty, unfulfilling experience.
Starring Lucie Debay, Arieh Worthalter and Ciaran O’Brien, Hunted premieres Thursday, Jan. 14 on Shudder.