A hot-tempered young woman finds herself in a remote woodland cabin full of kill-hungry, rifle-toting men in Hunting Daze, a lean and punchy debut feature from Quebecois writer-director Annick Blanc. The film’s genre-friendly set-up seems to promise suspense thriller dynamics with supernatural horror overtones, and indeed both elements are present to a degree. But the plot ultimately takes a more elliptical orbit, touching on gaslighting, toxic masculinity and the dubious wisdom of crowds. Even if the screenplay stretches credulity at times, Blanc’s brisk, bouncy, twisty narrative should keep most viewers gripped. Launched at SXSW in March, this French-language Canadian production is making its European debut at Karlovy Vary film festival this week.
The opening hook to Hunting Daze is a little contrived, but deftly handled. Far from home, stranded on a remote forest higwhay deep in northern Quebec, Nina (Nahéma Ricci) and her fellow strippers have run out of gasoline. Resourceful Nina calls in help from one of last night’s customers, Kevin ( Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi), who is part of an hunting party on a stag weekend in a cabin nearby. When this call-out leads to a bust-up with her douchebag male manager, Nina decides to hitch a ride with Kevin instead, thinking she can catch a bus back to Montreal. But on discovering her public transport options are non-existent, she ends up a reluctant guest at the all-male gathering instead.
While these macho city slicker are initially wary of allowing a woman into their testosterone-heavy safe space, older alpha-male team leader Bernard (Bruno Marcil) smooths everyone’s nerves by making Nina promise she will strictly follow the group rules: “You must act like a wolf,” he insists, “carry yourself like a man.” Part of Nina’s initiation into ritual masculinity entails learning to hunt, shoot and skin deer, even blasting one with a rifle at point blank range. Killing and eating animals in the wild, Bernard mainsplains pompously, is much more honest and honourable than the “murder by proxy” of buying meat at the supermarket.
The latent tensions behind Hunting Daze begin to surface after the group unexpectedly encounter Dudos (Noubi Ndiaye), a wandering stranger who appears to be an illegal African immigrant. At this point, Blanc seems to be priming us for a familiar finger-wagging lecture about problematic white males, with Nina an obvious target for sexism and Dudos for racism. To her credit, she steers the story in a more nuanced direction, starting with an accidental shooting injury and an agonising group debate about how to deal with it. The central conflict here is less about gender or racial difference than about wider power dynamics. Should we bow to peer pressure and take the consensus route, or challenge majority opinion to pursue a higher moral purpose?
From the start, the forest backdrop of Hunting Daze feels both real and symbolic, an off-grid fairy-tale space where the gravitational pull of normal human society begins to recede and dissolve. But Blanc really amplifies the more surreal folk-horror dimension during the film’s final battle of wills, adding heavy symbolism and hallucination, flaming rifles and witch-burning imagery, nightmarish visions and dead characters apparently coming back to life. Though often confusing, these scenes are visually impressive.
Viewed as an elevated genre exercise, Hunting Daze is a fun, twist-heavy ride with a kick-ass heroine and some gorgeous landscape imagery. Taken as a more serious contribution to the feminist thriller canon, however, it relies a little too much on its characters making poor decisions and risky choices, many of them wildly implausible, especially the explosive finale. Blanc poses some pretty interesting questions about power, patriarchy and red-meat machismo, but she never quite answers them, apparently preferring the thrill of the chase over any solid, satisfying conclusion.
Director, screenwriter: Annick Blanc
Cast: Nahéma Ricci, Bruno Marcil, Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi, Marc Beaupré, Alexandre Landry, Maxime Genois, Noubi Ndiaye
Cinematography: Vincent Gonneville
Editing: Amélie Labrèche
Music: Peter Venne
Producer: Maria Gracia Turgeon
Production company: Midi La Nuit (Canada)
World sales: ArtHood Entertainment GmbH
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Midnight)
In French
79 minutes