The following contains spoilers for Prey, currently streaming on Hulu.
Since its release, Dan Trachtenberg's Prey has taken the world by storm, becoming the most successful premiere in Hulu history. This is all the more rewarding given just how big of a risk Prey was from the outset. The Predator franchise has remained a surefire hit at the box office in the decades since John McTiernan's original Predator in 1986, with each subsequent sequel essentially scrapping the narrative threads of the previous one in an attempt to start fresh again. Titling the film Prey made things even riskier, basically disconnecting the film from the Predator franchise from a general audience's perspective. But as it turns out, Prey more than earns its title with a thorough and thought-provoking narrative and thematic examination of the relationship between Predator and Prey.
Setting Prey in the Northern Great Plains in 1719 and centering it around Naru, a young Comanche woman, is an absolutely inspired choice and one that pays off tenfold. Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison sculpt Naru into such a fully-formed character, with her own concretely established wants and desires. Between painting her into such a conflicted corner of her own life, longing to be respected and seen as not just a healer and potential child-bearer but instead as a hunter and viable candidate for War Chief, and Amber Midthunder's utterly captivating performance, Prey ensures that Naru is infinitely compelling to watch in her own right. Well before any Yautjas show up, this is defined as Naru's story, and it's all the better for it.
Entrenching the story of Prey so deeply in Naru's journey and in authenticating the time and place of the setting results in the film thrusting audiences headfirst into a world full of predators. Before any extraterrestrial presence comes crashing out of the sky, Naru is seen as prey by everyone around her. Her tribe and her family see her efforts to prove herself as a hunter as little more than careless acts that put herself and others in harm's way. The very environment of the Great Plains, as beautifully shot as it is, is prepared to swallow her whole. Lions, bears and mud pits are all coldly indifferent to Naru's wants and desires; they simply see her as prey.
In taking its time to thoroughly and painstakingly establish the world of its story, Prey perfectly sets the stage for the introduction of a Yautja to further compound and foreground the predatory relationships on display. One of the most striking scenes in the film is the 'Feral Hunter's' introduction, in which Trachtenberg and co. elegantly showcase the food chain of the Great Plains and how this Yautja disrupts it.
In a single unbroken shot, Prey demonstrates this. As an ant climbs along the Yautja's arm, a rat comes along and eats the ant. As the rat devours the ant, a snake sneaks up behind the rat and eats it. The snake then notices the presence of the cloaked Yautja and bears its fangs, striking at it. The Yautja skewers the snake and skins it alive. With this single shot, Prey sets up its own version of a longstanding Predator tradition: the Yautjas only look to kill that which they see as a fellow predatory threat.
Prey hammers this idea home once more in a subsequent scene, in which the Yautja encounters a wolf chasing a rabbit and engages the wolf in combat. The ant, the rat, the rabbit -- these creatures are meaningless to the Yautja. As the Feral Hunter watches the wolf chase the rabbit, his headset display even identifies the wolf as 'predator' and the rabbit as 'prey' in the Yautja language's text.
Up to this point, Naru's story and the Feral Hunter's story have remained largely separate threads, each one developing the idea of the predator and prey relationship in their own fashion. But then, they come crashing headfirst into each other in the bear sequence. After hunting and tracking a bear across the Plains, Naru, at last, finds it and attempts to strike it down. This is a part of her Kühtaamia, a Comanche rite of passage in which a hunter proves themselves by hunting something that is also hunting them. When the bear attacks her, the Feral Hunter intervenes, seeing Naru as prey and the bear as predator. He kills the bear but lets Naru go free, something she is later mocked for by other hunters from her tribe.
Prey's entire idea of the predatory relationships of the Great Plains is further expanded upon once the French voyageurs are introduced into the story. Much like the Yautja itself, the French are an invasive species here, disrupting the natural food chain. When they take Naru and her brother Taabe prisoner and set them out as bait for the Feral Hunter, he instead massacres all of them, identifying them as the true threat.
Across the entirety of Prey, Naru isn't passive for even a moment. She is an incredibly active character, driving the story in every sense of the word, but every other character in the story (with the exceptions of Taabe and the best on-screen dog in years, Sarii) consistently fails to see her as someone with an agency of her own. To them, she is invisible. This is what makes Prey's finale so incredibly satisfying.
After taking the orange totsiyaa that lowers her body temperature, Naru uses one of the last surviving Frenchmen as bait for the Yautja, becoming literally invisible to the Feral Hunter as he closes in on the man he identifies as a fellow predator. When Naru attacks, she upends the Feral Hunter's earlier diagnosis of her. She uses the predatory and dangerous world around her to her advantage in a thematically-loaded fashion, defeating the Feral Hunter with all the things that have tried to kill her throughout the film: a Frenchman's pistol, the mud-pit and finally, the Feral Hunter's own Boltcaster.
Prey ends with Naru having earned the respect of all those who doubted her. She returns home with the Feral Hunter's decapitated head in tow and is declared War Chief. After spending the entire first act of the story being seen as prey by her family and tribe and spending the second act being seen as prey by the Feral Hunter, the third act sees Naru exploiting all of these expectations to completely redefine the predator and prey relationships of the Great Plains.
To see how it earns its title, Prey is now available to stream on Hulu.