![]() The Guy, the universal evil that lurks within all men, and Eve, the Biblical first woman. You’ll get it at the ‘end of the world’ sequence that twists a realistic portrayal of victim and assailant into larger-than-life archetypes. Character arcs and tonal shifts are two entirely different things the actors all deliver exceptional performances, but our journey with them is heavily distorted by Paronnoud’s experimental direction. The entrapment is difficult realism but a bizarre incident flips both their car and their world upside down and the ensuing cat-and-mouse game becomes an exhilarating chrysalis as both predator and prey turn animalistic to survive. It’s 2021 and I’m done enduring 70-minutes of explicit degradation for a last act of female empowerment. I dreaded a simple update on I Spit on Your Grave (1978). Thank God this isn’t just another rape-revenge film. After ‘The Guy’ (Arieh Worthalter) proposes a threesome with his ‘Accomplice’ (Ciaran O’Brien) and pulls out his video camera to capture her dawning awareness of helplessness, Eve is soon taken deep into the wilderness. Hunted starts with an ordinary night out as Eve (Lucie Debay) takes a chance with flirtation in the back of a stranger’s car when another man suddenly settles into the driver’s seat. But as the IMDb summary so smugly outlines: “Man chases Woman-nothing new. Paronnaud and co-writer Léa Pernollet are addressing that age old narrative of woman as prey. Sounds like the arc of every Final Girl a structure so reiterated it’s as recognisable as folktales like Little Red Riding Hood. Socio-political context may be worlds apart but the theme of one woman’s personal journey through a patriarchal hell, forged into something stronger, is universal. Vincent Paronnaud, who adapted the graphic novel autobiography by Narjane Satrapi Persepolis (2007), has now made a trippy psychological revenge horror. At time of writing, audiences are still trapped inside due to a pandemic, so what better way to escape than 11 weeks of exclusive original films? And who better for a killer-in-the-woods yarn than the acclaimed French director of an Academy Award-nominated animation set during the Iranian revolution?
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