Fantasia Fest 2020: ‘Hunted’ filters Little Red Riding Hood through a vengeful thriller

If Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge has taught us anything, it is that rape-revenge exploitation can be masterfully and artfully portrayed with capable and extraordinary handiwork. From such classics as The Virgin Spring and I Spit on Your Grave to more modern fair like Teeth and Revenge, rape-revenge is a well-trodden road that spans grindhouse terror to arthouse splendor. Director Vincent Paronnaud manages a bit of both (to varying degrees of success) with his latest feature, Hunted, from a script co-written with Léa Pernollet (Heidi en Chine), playing this year’s Fantasia Fest.

The film opens on an older woman and her son sitting around a campfire in the wilderness. “Do you hear that, Jeremy?” she begins. “Hear what?” he returns. To which she replies, “The song of the forest.” She turns her eyes to the skies and the clattering of tree branches, a ghoulish moan floating on the midnight wind. It’s an ominous, mood-setting opener that lays foundation into which Paronnaud plans to soak the viewer. “The story begins a long time ago…,” she then launches into a haunted fable, one of gruesome imagery around one young woman’s life nearly snuffed out by an army of 100 peasants, led by a priest named Nicodemus (a figure found in the Gospel of John). It is here Paronnaud stages the woodlands itself as a character; as the story goes, a wolf pack comes to the young woman’s rescue, slaughtering the priest and all his company.

Fast forward a number of years, and such a tall tale becomes the basis of a brutal reality.

Lucie Debay (The Barefoot Emperor, The Confession) plays Eve, a construction company supervisor who must not only prove her worth to a domineering, high-strung boss but combat the universal male gaze. During a business trip, she decides to hit up a local watering hole, sling back a few mojitos, and bask in a cool ambiance. When a drunkenly sleazy man approaches her, nearly ruffing her up when she declines his advances, the resident nice guy (Arieh Worthalter, Girl, Mothers’ Instinct) swoops in to save the day, much to Eve’s relief. The two strike up an instant connection, and upon a few more drinks, head into a cloud of neon strobe lights to dance and later steal away to make-out in the backseat of his car.

A couple minutes tick by, and the unnamed Handsome Man abruptly pulls away. His accomplice (Ciaran O’Brien, Ripper Street, Pursuit), whom he’d previously called his “brother,” slides into the front seat and revs up the engine. It quickly becomes evident the two men have nothing but sinister intentions, as they laugh off Eve’s pleas to drive her back to the strip. Instead, they drop her off in the middle of an unlit stretch of road, leaving her to hike to a nearby gas station. The men drive away but not before the ringleader whips out his handheld camcorder to film a quick shot and taunt her.

Eve hightails it to the gas station and bums a ride from the attendant, who’s nearing the end of his shift. All appears to be well, and what could have been an absolute nightmare is behind her. Or so she thinks. While the gas station clerk is busy cleaning up for the night, none other than The Handsome Man pops out from the next aisle over. “Hello, little girl,” he sneers, making a reference to the Big Bad Wolf (see: Into the Woods). Seemingly paralyzed by fear to do anything, often a common bodily reaction in the face of such danger, she does as she’s told, and the men pack Eve, mouth duct-taped and hands bound, into the trunk of their car.

Following a car crash, Eve, whose attire nods to Little Red Riding Hood’s blood-red cape, breaks free and flies into the darkened countryside. Akin to Revenge, Hunted banks hard into the environment sprouting up as both a detriment and an ally to Eve’s fight for her life. While the latter film never depicts an assault onscreen, it is heavily alluded to whenever The Handsome Man replays previous footage of countless other women he’s captured and tortured; there are only a few brief moments of video and audio here, which is a welcome creative choice. We don’t need to see an assault happen in order to believe women. A simple suggestion is quite enough.

Worthalter offers up a terrifying performance as the women-loathing psychopath, and many scenes become downright uncomfortable. His manic bloodlust is balanced out with O’Brien’s portrayal of a naive, impressionable co-conspirator. Together, they represent two contrasting, yet still dangerous, kinds of men: the overly aggressive misogynist and the passive observer.

There’s no mistaking Hunted oozes style and buckets of moody, unsettling woodlands imagery, but the third act unfortunately unravels fairly quickly. When the woods are traded for the slickness of a new housing development, the tonal shift is jarring and deflating. Even more, Eve has devolved into a wild-haired, wide-eyed, face-painted savage, so when The Handsome Man does finally get his comeuppance, it’s lost real, visceral impact.

Nonetheless, Hunted arrives as a frightening modern-day Little Red Riding Hood allegory with plenty of look and design to lock the viewer’s interest. And Lucie Debay truly shines with an emotional performance that’ll really rip your heart out.

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