Hunted

In What Happened Was ..., Tom Noonan's somewhat lost indie drama re-released this week, there's a pivotal moment surrounding a dark and violent crime story that the author explains, almost naively, that it's a kids book. Never read the Grimm Brothers, she proffers, and that's sort of the experience of watching Hunted, the latest original feature from horror streaming service Shudder, and director Vincent Paronnaud's first solo feature since 2011.

Anyone expecting Paronnaud to continue down the path that he started down with his remarkable paired collaboration with Marjane Satrapi (the animated adaptation of her graphic novel Persepolis and its live-action follow up, Chicken With Plums) will be lost in the woods on this wild and wooly fairy tale, much like Ève (Debay). However, first there's a seemingly unrelated digression, with a woman (Milsdochter) telling a child (Ryelandt) a campfire story about crusaders, cannibalism, and forest spirits. What exactly this has to do with the fate of Ève, who makes the wrong hook-up in a bar and finds herself gagged with duct tape, running through a European forest, pursued by two low-life rapist scumbags (Worthalter and O'Brien), takes quite a while to unfurl.

Hunted doesn't quite fit into the new wave of eurosleaze, although it undoubtedly travels down the same filthy tracks. It undoubtedly adheres to the trend of mercilessly updating fairytales, and like so many of its kin it finds a joyous frisson in adding a rape-revenge component to Little Red Riding Hood. Yet Ève's revenge is more for those abducted before, shown in glimpses of videos shot by the unnamed guy (Worthalter). He's a truly despicable character but, as the hunt goes on, also the most bizarrely rounded of the cartoonish cast. As Ève becomes more animalistic in her quest for survival, and embraces her eventual savage attack on the beasts that pursue her, the appalling antagonist become more over-inflated and absurd.

Which is sort of what happens to Hunted. It's a hodgepodge of wildly divergent narrative styles, from the mystical to the grisly and into the ridiculous. Accents scattershot erratically in this European co-production, not quite giving it an anywhere/nowhere feel but more placing it in a sort of distracting limbo. On the positive side, it's definitely never dull, especially in the closing chase as Ève (by this stage more Warner Bros. Tasmanian Devil than character) and the guy bounce around a show home in a new development, wrecking the contractor-grade furniture. By this stage, it's hard to tell what any of this has to do with that darkly enchanting folkloric opening.

Available on the Shudder horror streaming platform now.