Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Greg Swinson, Ryan Thiessen
Starring: Natalie Terrazzino, JC Oakley III, Trevor Tucker, Dave Holt, Hunter Tinney, Reece Griffin,
Philip Zimny
The clever thing about Die Hard is how it takes the simple
premise of your average slasher movie and flips it on its head. In a
slasher movie you traditionally get a sole antagonist who spends the
running time offing multiple protagonists until the showdown with the
final girl. Die Hard conversely gives us a lone hero and
multiple villains, all of whom are offed one by one until a standoff with
the lead bad guy.
Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen's
Hunt Her Kill Her explicitly acknowledges the influence of
Die Hard. There's a scene in which a message is attached to a corpse, the heroine
ends up clad in a bloodied sleeveless vest, and at one point she evens
emulates Bruce Willis by speaking the words "Think, think." But the film
also acknowledges Die Hard's debt to the slasher movie. What we get here is essentially a
Die Hard clone with a slasher movie's masked villains and
final girl, though in this case she's the only girl.
Financially troubled after ending a relationship with her abusive partner
Danny (JC Oakley III), young mother Karen (Natalie Terrazzino) takes a job as the night shift janitor at a furniture factory. As soon
as she sets foot in her new place of employment Karen experiences casual
misogyny from the elderly male day shift janitor who shows her around the
factory and issues instructions, all while rolling his eyes in a manner
that silently suggests he's thinking "Women!" When the old duffer gets a
stain on his prized bowling shirt, he's impressed when Karen removes it
using a can of soda, an early indication of the resourcefulness and quick
thinking she will be forced to rely upon later.
Before the factory closes up for the night Karen experiences some not so
casual misogyny when she's approached in a threatening manner by a pair of
Danny's friends in the bathroom. Once the factory locks its doors she's
left alone for the night and it seems her biggest worry is the babysitter
she left in charge of her young daughter Lily (Olivia Graves). Or
so she thinks. Karen begins to hear noises coming from the darkened
corners of the facility. They're just...uh, factory noises, right? Wrong.
Suddenly Karen realises a group of masked men have made their way in and
are explicitly there to murder her.
Hunt Her Kill Her is the very definition of tight,
economical, low-budget genre filmmaking. There isn't an ounce of fat on
its bones and it gets right into the meat of its promised scenario in the
first 20 minutes. It's often said the greatest asset a low budget
filmmaker can have is access to a single location in which the entire
story can play out. That's exactly what we get here as the film never
leaves the factory. Swinson and Thiessen understand the importance of
geography in a movie like this, and they make sure to map out the layout
of the factory in those early scenes. As Karen is being shown around we
get to familiarise ourselves with what will become a battleground later in
her shift.
A maze of machinery and pallets, the factory is the perfect setting for a
game of cat and mouse. Speaking of cats and mice,
Hunt Her Kill Her bears the influence of classic cartoons,
with Karen becoming a resourceful Roadrunner to the masked Wile E.
Coyotes. While the film plays its thrills straight, there's an element of
slapstick in how the villains' male arrogance often leads to their
downfall, constantly running into the equivalent of fake tunnels painted
on walls by Karen.
Karen is the best type of horror heroine, one who begins the movie as a
meek mouse and ends it as a roaring lioness. Every time she takes down one
of her burly male opponents it's done in a feasible manner as she relies
on her wits and intelligence rather than brute strength, and sometimes she
relies on a combination of luck and her opponents' under-estimation of her
will to survive. Like Darth Vader, the villains are voiced by different
actors than they're played by, which means we get a combination of
imposing physiques and sinister deep voices, both of which serve to
highlight Karen's feminine vulnerability.
Movies of this nature, with a simple premise and a single location, too
often run out of ideas early on and end up padding the narrative with
extraneous and unwanted material. Hunt Her Kill Her sticks
solely to the premise, never pausing to fill in any unnecessary backstory.
All we need to know is that a group of men want to kill Karen, and that
she wants to survive the night and make it back to her daughter.
Practically a silent movie for most of its running time,
Hunt Her Kill Her is a minor masterclass in visual
storytelling, with Swinson and Thiessen mining tension from every
nook and cranny of their confined setting. There's some very clever
filmmaking on display here, and I was particularly impressed at how
Swinson and Thiessen often switch the POV from predator to prey within a
single camera move rather than a cut. Perhaps Swinson and Thiessen benefit
from being forced to be creative with their restrictive budget, but if was
the head of Blumhouse I'd be throwing money at these guys to see what they
might come up with next.
