A slight shift of light and angle can turn a mere boy into a character from Classical myth. Its characters are smart and make use of tactical thinking, but Paronnaud draws heavily on imagery handed down to us from Antiquity. Raw, immediate and unrelenting, Hunted is a film designed to speak directly to the wild part within each one of us. 'Imagine that you were a girl all alone in the forest and you knew you were going to die soon,' the man conjectures, trying to get into the mindset of the hunted - but his description doesn't fit Eve at all. Intuition becomes more important than reason, instinct more useful than observation. Civilised qualities can only get one so far. It's a landscape with which we are all familiar from childhood stories, and one which features prominently in the horror genre. This is Jung's primal forest, accessible anywhere, familiar territory to Canadian viewers watching the film at Fantasia 2020 where it intersects nicely with another such tale, Michael Venus' Sleep (both feature brief but important appearances by wild boar). Made in Belgium with French and Flemish-speaking characters communicating in English, Hunted has a cosmopolitan quality which seems like the epitomГ© of modernity, but in the thick of the trees it takes on a different aspect. This disrupts any simple narrative about men as predators and women as prey, which is further complicated by the reticence of the man's companion, who quickly comes to seem more out of his depth than Eve is. We also get, eventually, some insights into what led the man from the bar to become so abusive (and not just towards Eve), with an unexpected last-minute utterance suggesting that it was never really other people that he most wanted to destroy. Echoes of this story run throughout what follows, imbuing a magical realist quality at odds with the brutal cynicism of the main story. The key is in the prologue, in which an old woman tells a child a story about the spirit of the forest and how it protects the innocent. If you think you've seen it all before, though, Vincent Paronnaud's thriller will make you think again. It's something that many women have to consider on a frequent basis in day to day life. This may not be an unusual scenario in cinema. Before she knows it, she's fighting for her life. It's only after they leave, after she gets into a car with him and the man he claimed was his brother, that the mood changes. There she meets a man (Arieh Worthalter) who seems to understand her frustration. Tired, she goes for a drink in a local bar to get a bit of time to herself. He would like to send a man in to take care of it. She's there to supervise a construction site and she's being bullied by her boss for not being aggressive enough with the contractors.

The hunted 2020 movie