Hunting Ava Bravo (2022) poster

Hunting Ava Bravo (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director – Gary Auerbach, Screenplay – Julie Auerbach, Marc Blucas & Kevin Tavolaro, Story – Gary Auerbach, Julie Auerbach & Kevin Tavolaro, Producers – Marc Blucas, Chris Copier, Kate del Castillo & Kevin Tavolaro, Photography – Charles Unice, Photography , Music – Sal “El Muerto” Ledesma & Giancarlo Liana, Visual Effects – Jacob Dickey & Joel Petrie, Special Effects – Roundy Special FX, Makeup Effects – Salt City Effects, Prosthetic Designer – Logan Long, Production Design – Meg Cabell. Production Company – Top Dead Center Films/Wild Sheep Content.

Cast

Kate del Castillo (Ava Bravo), Marc Blucas (Buddy King), Halem Medina (The Stranger), Bryce Fernelius (Jose), Julio Lazarte (Antonio)


Plot

Ava Bravo comes around in a cabin on a remote mountainside. A tape recording is left telling her that she can win her freedom if she can make it five miles to a snowmobile while being hunted by her abductor. Instead, she waits for her hunter to emerge from where he is hiding in the cellar and turns the tables, taking his rifle and leaving him imprisoned. However, when she arrives at the snowmobile, she finds only a trap waiting. Her only recourse is to return to the cabin and force her captor to take her to his snowmobile. He is waiting for her and reveals that he is Buddy King, a millionaire who has had success with a chain of barbecue franchises. His pleasure in life is selecting people who have survived arduous circumstances and then hunting them – Ava has been chosen because she escaped from a previous abductor. As they travel, a series of tense psychological games ensues between the two as they vie for power over the other.


Hunting Ava Bravo comes from Gary Auerbach, who has mostly worked in tv, producing documentary and reality tv shows such as Paranormal State (2007- ), Decoded (2010-2), Prophets of Science Fiction (2011-2), Hangar 1: The UFO Files (2014-5), as well as producing several horror films with The Occupants (2014). Stay Out of the Fucking Attic (2019) and Josie Jane: Kill the Babysitter (2020).

Hunting Ava Bravo is a film about human bloodsports. The template of the story about the person forced to survived in the wilderness with their bare hands while being pursued by a skilled hunter before managing to turn the tables was first put down in the short story The Most Dangerous Game (1924). This was filmed as the classic The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which still remains unbettered despite numerous remakes, unofficial remakes and copies of the basics. I have a detailed essay on the genre here at Films About Human Bloodsports and Death Games.

Kate del Castillo fights back in Hunting Ava Bravo (2022)
Ava Bravo (Kate del Castillo) fights back

The 2020-2 period saw a surprising number of films about people being hunted by others with the likes of Alone (2020), Hunted (2020), Apex (2021), Prey (2021), The Retreat (2021), Death Hunt (2022), Hounded (2022), Hunt Club (2022), Unseen (2023) and You Can’t Run Forever (2024), along with yet another remake of The Most Dangerous Game (2022). My theory about this sudden upsurge of medium-to-low budget films on the topic is that they were easy to shoot during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown – being able to be filmed outdoors as opposed to contained spaces and thus avoid quarantine, while having casts of only around a half-dozen people and small crews and not requiring much in the way of sets, reducing the number of potential infectees.

The film switches you off with a really dreadful cover version of Fence Me In (1934) as the opening credits play out. Thereafter though, the film gets markedly better. It is a variation on The Most Dangerous Game with some differences – the most notable is that the hunted victim is now a woman. Rather than the usual action or survival focus of these films, the film puts all of its focus on the psychological interplay between hunter and hunted – the vying for supremacy, the question of trust and the abrupt reversals. In this regard, Marc Blucas, a minor acting name who also writes the film’s screenplay, gives an excellent performance as the hunter.


Trailer here


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