French writer-director Vincent Paronnaud’s (Persepolis) fetid attempt to pair art house with meat grinder results in one of the worst films of the year: Hunted. An impotent rape-revenge fairy tale, which borders on snuff with its malignant streak of cruelty and misogyny, Hunted takes form as a woman (Lucie Debay) is chased through the woods by two psychopathic men.  Issuing threats to “f*ck her to death”, the sexually violent antagonist (played with deranged glee by Christian Bronchart) spends the feature screaming at our heroine that she’s a “f*cking whore” or “f*cking slut”. Charming.

The material is both shallow and deeply unpleasant for the sake of unpleasantness, particularly when the female protagonist in question is deprived of her agency for the majority of the feature. Paronnaud’s attempt to punch up the subtext by evoking magical realism fails to add any real depth and instead comes across as a misguided attempt to counterfeit profundity. Ugly, vapid moral center aside, Hunted is just a barren artistic effort; the allusions to fairy tales end at aesthetic mimicry, giving the feature a raggedy, slapdash quality, with so many discordant accents that you’ll have no idea where it’s supposed to take place. If you still have an inkling to see Hunted anyways, do yourself a favor and see Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge instead, a movie that actually does its avenging angel right. (D)

*Shudder has asked critics to only run capsule reviews of ‘Hunted’

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