Director – Tommy Boulding, Screenplay – Ray Bogdanovich & Dean Lines, Producer – Ben Jacques, Photography – Martyna Knitter, Music – Ditone Studio (Abi Wade & Joel Wells), Visual Effects – Exeo, Special Effects – Pyrojunkies, Production Design – Louis Lasa Tarbuck. Production Company – Fiction Films.
Cast
Malachi Pullar-Latchman (Chaz), Hannah Traylen (Vix), Samantha Bond (Katherine Redwick), Ross Coles (Tod), James Lance (Hugo Redwick), Nick Moran (Mallory), Nobuse Junior (Leon), James Faulkner (Remington Redwick), Louis Walwyn (Miles Redwick), Larry Lamb (Gregory)
Plot
Leon, along with his younger brother Chaz, Vix and Tod act as house burglars, venturing into homes in the English countryside to steal antiques. Gregory, the dealer they work for, assigns them to break into the estate of Katherine Redwick to obtain a ceremonial dagger. However, Katherine and her family discover the four and taser them. In the morning, they are released on the grounds – only to then find that Katherine and her family are now intending to hunt them with the hounds.
Hounded joins one of a renewed spate of films that came out around 2020-2 about people being hunted by others. This period also included likes of Alone (2020), Hunted (2020), Apex (2021), Prey (2021), The Retreat (2021), Death Hunt (2022), Hunt Club (2022), Hunting Ava Bravo (2022) and You Can’t Run Forever (2024), plus yet another version of the quintessential tale The Most Dangerous Game (2022). Most of these fall into being variants on The Most Dangerous Game scenario – derived from the classic story The Most Dangerous Game (1924) by Richard Connell in which a lone man is forced to flee through the wilderness while pursued by an armed aristocrat. I have a full essay on the surprisingly prolific body of these films here at Films About Human Bloodsports and Death Games.
Hounded has the amusing idea that the British aristocracy, having had fox hunts cancelled on them, have now taken up hunting people, in specific those they consider beneath them. In this sense, the film is drawn across class lines – with the aristocracy represented by a family on their large estate looking spiffy on their horses in scarlet red hunting suits up against the rest of the country represented by working class chavs and the children of immigrants. The same theme of the aristocracy hunting the working class also appeared around the same time in Get Duked! (2019), albeit played for comic effect.
The film does okay and generates reasonable tension in various places. It is not a work among the human hunting sub-genre that really has an audience on the edge of the seat in suspense but does adequately.
Hounded was a directorial debut for Tommy Boulding who had been working as an editor throughout the 2010s.
