Review of The Hunt (2020) by Hnestlyonthesly — 23 Mar 2020

It’s hard to fairly review The Hunt by a single set of criteria, because the movie itself is a little schizophrenic. The trailer, as is becoming clear from interviews with producers post-release to explain the “clever marketing campaign” aka “deceptive marketing campaign” aka “why did Emma Roberts agree to be the face of this movie campaign,” was clearly composed as a provocation, but felt more like a send up to the some nefarious parts of the internet with dog whistles about the “globalist world order” hunting “deplorables.” Subsequent interviews with producers suggest the trailer was intentionally constructed to mislead audiences about the marquee actors, because all of us famously like sitting through 90-minute movies we’ve been led to believe will star completely different actors.

The film itself retains the core of this edgelord aesthetic in its script, portraying liberal progressives as prickly hypocrites, using the hunt as fantasy-fulfillment for working out their deep-rooted political animus toward “hicks” and “illiterate gun enthusiasts.” The deplorable cast with one notable exception is replete with the language of the most extreme fringe id of the right wing internet: calling people “cucks,” accusing Muslim refugees of being “crisis actors,” reminding convenience store owners of their “second amendment rights” to “stand your ground.” The film asks you to forgive it for these gross caricatures of (presumably?) Trump supporters (he’s only referred to as “rat **** in chief”) by killing off the deplorables, thereby muting their speech and removing the complication of trying to decide who to sympathize with as the story progresses. Friend sat next to me and cried out a couple of times at the beginning of this movie, “Who am I supposed to cheer for?” which could have been an echo from the previous night when Charlie Conway lost his temper one too many times in front of the Warrior’s new junior varsity coach.

Listen, I'm not a defenseman, I'm a scorer !

Just wait til Coach wheels his daughter onto the ice, Charlie, then you’ll understand.

I think the real challenge of this movie is it was trying to get away with dog whistling to racist internet trolls by co-opting a well-worn meme for the plot, then parroting their language, but it refuses the stick the landing by trying to make the audience root for people with truly repugnant beliefs about women, people who are poor, disabled, sick, gun victims, minorities, etc. Instead, at its best, it plays with the idea of false equivalencies, by casting the shortcomings of left wing liberal progressivism as an object of ridicule on par with the outrageous beliefs of those on the fringes of the right. This point is made clearer in no scene more than the moment when Athena (Hilary Swank) Reveals Her Big Evil Plan to Crystal May while making grilled cheese (which inexplicably doesn’t burn during their fight) and struggles to see the inconsistencies in her own logic concerning the way in which she has actualized the cancel campaign against her.

But in practice, the speech of the left is disproportionately critiqued the further along in the movie we progress, since our protagonist (played by Betty Gilpin, of GLOW, Stuber, Isn’t It Romantic, and American Gods fame?, who is actually Taylor Schilling and anyone who disagrees can fight me) is markedly silent about her politics in a way none of her fellow hunted are.

Prove to me these photos are not the same person.

She almost exclusively speaks in allegory, presumably to hold back a major twist at the end of the movie (spoiler), the fact that she’s been mistaken for a(nother?) deplorable by the same name, which is sort of like asking you to sympathize with Rey for having unremarkable parents and then retroactively giving her the most powerful grandfather in the universe.

The Hunt’s laugh lines are muddled, because the movie is either too shy to lean into its own irreverent premise or only clever by half, by parroting the language of deplorables only selectively and thereby causing confusion about who and when we should laugh with sympathetic characters. We’re left watching a mostly mute actress fight it out with Hilary Swank playing a little dumb and so it doesn’t quite feel that urgent to see the Good Guy Win at the end, because it’s not clear the movie knows either.