Overview
Twelve strangers wake up in a clearing. They don't know where they are—or how they got there. In the shadow of a dark internet conspiracy theory, ruthless elitists gather at a remote location to hunt humans for sport. But their master plan is about to be derailed when one of the hunted turns the tables on her pursuers.
Craig Zobel directs the film from a screenplay by Lindeloff and Cuse, which is a biting satire of modern society by way of a sometimes gory action horror. A group of people are drugged and awaken to find themselves the hunted in an elaborate hunt-game set up on an isolated manor. In a joyous reversal of expectations, the hunted are right-wing conspiracy nuts, and the hunters are woke liberals. This flipping of expected roles allows the film to have fun poking at the ridiculousness of the opposing politics, highlighting how alike we all are really, and maybe, just maybe, making the extremists of both sides of the political ideologies realise how crazy their viewpoints can sound at times.
A stab at gun culture, amendment rights, Qnon conspiracies, and self fulfilling ideologies, the film is sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, and sets the stall out very early on, before slowing down to focus on one particular struggle for survival in the guise of Betty Gilpin’s Crystal.
Absolute fun that can be embraced on a surface level as just a black-comic horror, or dug deep into as a political stab from the middle towards the fighters on both sides.