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Director: Franck Khalfoun
Writers: Rubén Ávila Calvo, Glen Freyer, Franck Khalfoun
“Night of the Hunted” should have been a 20-minute short film, 30 minutes tops. However, at 1 hour and 35 minutes, the thin plot about a woman being trapped in a remote gas station while an unknown sniper tries to shoot her to death becomes unbearably overstretched.
Camille Rowe plays protagonist Alice, who is introduced while talking to her husband on the phone about meeting a fertility specialist. Just as she ends the call, her friend John (Jeremy Scippio) enters the bathroom, implying that the two of them are having an affair. At 2 am, John drives Alice to her appointment, and they stop at a gas station to refuel. While Alice goes into the convenience store to grab some snacks, she is shot at by a sniper, and the night quickly turns into a deadly game of survival for her.
There are quite a few things in the film that don’t make sense, and I am not even going to get to those details, to keep review free of spoilers. But the most sleep-inducing part about “Night of the Hunted” is the fact that the plot heavily relies on conversations between Alice and the sniper, which are far too patronizing and uninteresting. The sniper talks about a lot of random issues, from vaccines to social media and how people get offended over everything. Perhaps some viewers might find the conversations compelling, but it started to make me yawn, even though I was watching the film barely four hours after I woke up from a proper night’s sleep.
Night of the Hunted” definitely had potential, and it’s also sprinkled with some clever metaphors in its world-building. For instance, the sniper is shooting from a billboard that reads “GODISNOWHERE,” all caps, without any spaces. It’s a deeply ironic situation, as Alice seems to be the target of a random violent crime, and the sniper also brutally targets the rare few who come to the gas station to refuel. For the victims, there is no God to help save them from the terrifying ordeal they find themselves in. The climax is surprisingly unexpected, however, the build-up to the end is repetitive, and very challenging to watch. Give it a go if you have high tolerance for verbose thrillers, where a criminal goes on and on about how messed up the world is.
Rating: 3.5 on 10. You can stream “Night of the Hunted” on Prime Video.
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