France/USA. 2023.
Crew
Director – Franck Khalfoun, Screenplay – Glen Freyer & Franck Khalfoun, Based on the Film La Noche de Raton (The Night of the Rat) (2015) Written by Ruben Avila Calvo & David R. Losada, Producers – Alexandre Aja, Noëmie Devide, Morris Ruskin & Alix Taylor, Photography – Steeven Petiteville, Music – Mathieu Carratier, Visual Effects – Digital District (Supervisor – Philippe “Falap” Aubnry), Special Effects Supervisors – Sam Dean & Tyler Matson, Makeup Effects Supervisor – Mike McCarthy, Production Design – Laurent Turlure. Production Company – Getaway Films/Cinestesia/Mojo Global Arts/Logical Content Ventures/Heavy Rainfall.
Cast
Camille Rowe (Alice Germain Bach), Jeremy Scippio (John), J. John Bieler (Doug), Monaia Abdelrahim (Cindy), Stasa Stanic (Sniper)
Plot
Alice Germain Bach, a marketing executive with the Phinzer pharmaceutical company, is driving home from a convention. What she has not told her husband Erik is that she was sleeping with her co-worker John. They pull in at a gas station on the highway. However, as Alice is in the convenience store, a sniper hiding on a nearby billboard shoots and kills John and sprays the store with fire. Alice takes cover inside the gas station where she also finds that the store’s clerk has been shot. The sniper talks to her by two-way radio and taunts her where he seems to know something about her background. As Alice tries to find a way to escape, the sniper claims to be everything from exacting revenge for Erik to holding her responsible for what her company has done to being an ordinary man who snapped because of a relationship break-up to a politically motivated rage shooter.
Franck Khalfoun is a former Alexandre Aja associate. He made small acting appearances in Aja’s High Tension (2003) and Piranha (2010), before Aja wrote and produced both Khalfoun’s directorial debut with the psycho-thriller P2 (2007), followed by the remake of Maniac (2012). Without Aja, Khalfoun went on to direct i-Lived (2015), Amityville: The Awakening (2017) and Prey (2019). Aja returns to oversee Night of the Hunted.
Night of the Hunted is a remake of the Spanish film La Noche de Raton (The Night of the Rat) (2015), which was directed by David R. Losada. Khalfoun has kept the same essential premise and set-up, the major difference being that the protagonist in this version is a woman rather than a man. In this regard, Night of the Hunted falls into the spate of 2020s films about women being hunted that began with the success of Alone (2020) – see also the likes of Hunted (2020), The Retreat (2021), Hunt Club (2022), Hunting Ava Bravo (2022) and You Can’t Run Forever (2024).
The premise of the people at the mercy of a sniper has been done before. There was The Sniper (1952) and Targets (1968) but they both concerned the psychology of people who snap and start shooting at others. Night of the Hunted falls more in line with King of the Hill (2007) and Downrange (2017), both films that take the point-of-view of people on the roadside in remote locales who are targeted by snipers. Both of these become, like Night of the Hunted does, survival thrillers where the targets try to navigate around the precarious shelter they have and improvise what is to hand to make an escape and/or defeat the killer.
Franck Khalfoun does a reasonable job in winding the tension up, in imprisoning Camille Rowe in the gas station store hiding behind the flimsy shelter of shelves and umbrellas, while trying to improvise a means to use what she can to defend herself. Assorted other people turn up to the gas station at various intervals to either become victims or take shelter inside the store with her. It all works with a reasonable tightness.
What becomes interesting about the film is how the identity of the sniper is never revealed – Camille Rowe even fails to unmask him at the end. This would appear to be a holdover from the Spanish film. The killer taunts Camille with apparent knowledge about her life – he may be punishing her for having an affair and be acting on behalf of her husband; or else exacting retribution for her being a marketing executive for a Big Pharma company; he may just be an ordinary person who snapped after a relationship breakup; or a rage killer acting out against Woke values, with he at one point even tying himself to Storm the Capitol rioters and anti-vaxxers. All of these are toyed with at different points, but we are left guessing as to his true motivations without the film alighting on any of them. With heavy-handed symbolism, the killer’s hiding place is a billboard that highlights the phrase ‘Godisnowhere’, which has an ambiguity that can either read as “God is Now Here” or “God is Nowhere.”
Night of the Hunted is unrelated to and should not be confused with the Jean Rollin horror film Night of the Hunted (1980).
Trailer here