The Hunt Club (2023) Review: Ambitious but Messy Execution

Hunt Club review: a strong premise and a muddled film

The pitch is clear and has real potential. A group of women, each short on money and options, accept an offer of $100,000 to take part in a hunt in a remote location. Once they arrive, they learn that they are the prey, and the hunters are a group of wealthy men who treat the practice as a club tradition. The women eventually turn the tables. It is the old survival story of The Most Dangerous Game, rebuilt around female characters and aimed at the kind of men who might run such an event.

The film comes from director Elizabeth Blake-Thomas and writers David Lipper and John F. Saunders, with Lipper also appearing in the cast and producing. Uncork’d Entertainment acquired the film for the United States in March 2023, and it opened on April 4. The running time is 87 minutes. The production company is Latigo Films.

The cast is the main thing the film has going for it. Mena Suvari plays Cassandra, a grieving mother on a self-destructive path who is pulled out of a bad night by Tessa, played by Maya Stojan. Casper Van Dien plays Carter, one of the villains, and Mickey Rourke plays Virgil, the enforcer. Will Peltz, Jessica Belkin, Jeremy London and Jason London appear in smaller parts. The Hollywood Reporter was the first outlet to announce the project.

The lineage matters here. The Most Dangerous Game began as a 1924 short story by Richard Connell and became a 1932 film, and the idea of wealthy people hunting humans has returned in many forms since. Each new version is judged on what it adds. Hunt Club adds a gender reversal and a class argument, which is a reasonable place to start, but the argument stays on the surface.

The problem is that a good premise and a recognizable cast cannot hide a lack of direction. This Hunt Club review has to note that the film cannot decide what it wants to say. It borrows the look of a B-movie, the politics of a revenge story and the anger of a protest film, and it does not give any of them enough attention.

What works: the women are people

The film’s best idea is to treat the captured women as individuals. Each one has a backstory, and each one is there because circumstances made the offer attractive. They are not props. Cassandra’s storyline, in which a mother tries to escape a bad situation while thinking about her daughter and her partner, gives Suvari something solid to play, and her best moments are quiet ones.

Stojan gets the most physical material and handles it well. Tessa is the kind of character the genre usually reserves for the men, tough, resourceful and quick, and Stojan makes her credible. When the women finally take revenge, the film delivers the satisfaction the audience has been waiting for, though the sequence is short.

What does not work: structure and villains

The central issue is timing. The actual hunt does not begin until late in the film, and the midpoint is given to Carter, who delivers a speech about the primal power of masculinity and what it means to hunt defenseless women. The scene is meant to establish the antagonists. It mostly establishes how little the script knows about them.

The men are written as stock figures of toxic masculinity: wealthy, comfortable and fond of long speeches about how the world has changed and what a real man used to be. They have no layers. The film wants the audience to hate them, and it succeeds, but it does so by making them simple. The good-versus-evil structure also ignores something the film otherwise implies, which is that harm usually comes from people close to the victim and not from distant strangers.

The visual language is another problem. A film that is critical of the male gaze keeps the women in underwear for much of the running time, which undercuts its own argument. The creative team behind the script is two men, which does not disqualify the project, but it does make the film’s attempts at speaking for the women feel less secure.

The subplot that hurts the tone

A storyline involving a sex worker is the film’s most serious misstep. Her story begins as a transaction and becomes something worse, and the film treats her revenge as one more thread to wrap up. Her experience, including a sexual assault that occurs off screen, changes direction quickly and has little connection to Cassandra’s story or to the hunt itself.

Taken seriously, such a storyline needs space and context. Here it feels attached to the film for the sake of a darker tone, and it pushes the material toward the rape-revenge genre, with titles like The Last House on the Left in the background, instead of the survival thriller the premise promises. The result is a tonal shift that the film is not equipped to handle.

Hunt Club at a glance

• Director: Elizabeth Blake-Thomas.
• Writers: David Lipper and John F. Saunders.
• Cast: Mena Suvari, Maya Stojan, Casper Van Dien, Mickey Rourke, Will Peltz, Jessica Belkin, Jeremy London, Jason London and David Lipper.
• Release: April 4, 2023, in the United States and Canada, through Uncork’d Entertainment.
• Running time: 87 minutes.

Verdict: where Hunt Club falls short

The film’s production values are a further limit. The hunt is described more than it is shown, perhaps because of the budget, and the action scenes lean on aftermath cutaways in place of actual chases. Apart from a few stunts by Stojan, the violence is mostly implied. There are many extreme close-ups, and the lighting and framing suffer in places. It is a B-movie, but not an especially lively one.

Content matters in a film like this, and the handling of it is a fair test of whether the filmmakers earned their subject. Violence against women is the engine of the plot, and a film that takes that seriously needs to give the victims real inner lives and the perpetrators real consequences. Hunt Club does the first part better than the second. The women are specific, and the men are templates. That imbalance undermines the revenge the film is building toward, because a victory over a cartoon feels smaller than a victory over a person.

The final stretch makes the same mistake in a different form. Carter’s son Jackson, played by Will Peltz, gets a redemption arc and a strange, almost close relationship with Cassandra, and the film never explains why the audience should care. The ending brings the revenge the movie has promised, then closes on a scene that recalls the final moments of The Rise of Skywalker.

Comparisons make the shortfall clearer. The survival-and-revenge model the film wants to follow has produced sharp results before, with the home-invasion thriller You’re Next as a good example of how a B-movie can use surprising backstories and twists to stay ahead of its audience. Hunt Club has the structure of that kind of film without the surprises. For a story about women who refuse to be victims, being a woman is treated as a sufficient reason to be a fighter, and the script does not build much more than that.

Viewers should also know what they are signing up for. The film contains scenes of abduction, violence and sexual assault, handled mostly off screen, and its tone shifts in ways that will not suit everyone. A viewer who prefers the lighter, pulpier end of the survival-thriller range may find some of it harder to watch than expected. Content like this can be defended when it serves the story, and the review above explains why it often does not here.

The honest summary of this Hunt Club review is that the movie aims higher than it reaches. It has a good idea, a few sharp performances and a satisfying turn when the women fight back. It lacks a consistent point of view, a villain with any depth and the discipline to cut what does not belong. A viewer who likes the genre and the cast may find enough to enjoy. Anyone expecting a smart feminist thriller will probably be disappointed.

A clearer message and a tighter script could have made this a strong indie. As it stands, it is a film with a worthwhile goal and no steady hand guiding it toward it.

Sources

• Hunt Club (film), Wikipedia — Checked against: director, cast and release details.