Incidentally, nobody calls themselves “the elite,” because that invariably has a negative connotation. Only someone deeply deluded would be flattered to be called an elitist.
Trump had not seen The Hunt when he asserted forcefully and authoritatively that it was racist, elitist, fueled by anger and hate, created specifically to cause chaos and inflame cultural divides, and ultimately create violence. The President did not need to know anything about the movie to angrily condemn it. Information and knowledge would only muddy his white-hot, incoherent rage.
If he’d thought about it, Trump would have realized that a movie about rich elites hunting poor people for fun would probably not portray the murderers in a positive light. Trump assumed that because The Hunt was a motion picture that did not star Kevin Sorbo, or Scott Baio, it would be a rabid anti-Trump manifesto encouraging the hunting of MAGA extremists for giggles.
It doesn’t matter how terrible someone’s politics may be; it’s never acceptable to hunt human beings. The lunatics hunting deplorables are not the good guys in The Hunt. They are, instead, the villains. How could they be anything but villains? Trump supporters are not portrayed in an overly positive light, either, but their transgressions are nothing compared to the sins of monsters who want to dole out the extrajudicial death penalty for the crime of disagreeing with them politically and behaving obnoxiously online.
The deeply derivative premise of The Hunt finds 11 luckless souls waking up in the middle of nowhere with gags in their mouths. This image is viscerally unnerving and highlights how the left sees the QAnon fringe as not just wrong and misguided but also dangerous, deluded, and borderline sub-human. They don’t just feel morally and politically superior; they see themselves as existing on a higher intellectual and evolutionary plane than the rubes who worship a man who could not care less about them, individually and as a class. The movie immediately becomes less creepy once the gags come off.
On paper, The Hunt has the potential to be as powerful and disturbing as Compliance. Zobel’s 2012 masterpiece dramatized a true story involving crank callers manipulating fast food workers into committing sex crimes by convincing them that they’re helping the police, all to explore the way ordinary people can be tricked into committing unthinkable transgressions if they think they’re doing the right thing. Compliance had the raw, radical realness of cinéma vérité. It felt like a documentary as much as a narrative docudrama. That is not true of The Hunt, which starts out broad and grows progressively less realistic as it proceeds.
To make the hunt more of a challenge, the evil leftists give the deplorables weapons for self-defense. It doesn’t make much of a difference. Deplorables versus the Lunatic Left proves to be a mismatch. The Hunt keeps us off-balance in its first act by introducing Trump-lovers that seem like they’ll be main characters and figure prominently in the proceedings, only to kill them off early. Let’s just say that if you’re watching The Hunt because you’re a huge fan of Emma Roberts or Ike Barinholtz, you might want to lower your expectations.
With the exception of Crystal May Creasey, a badass heroine played by Betty Gilpin, everyone in The Hunt is a broad caricature of a ubiquitous archetype rather than a human being with agency. They’re mean-spirited cartoons without substance or depth. Trump was convinced that The Hunt would be a radical leftist attack on his supporters, but it reserves most of its contempt for the hypocrisy of liberals who obsess about language and cultural sensitivity but feel justified killing people for having the wrong opinions.
Crystal proves a fierce foe. She’s sharp mentally and physically. She ascertains almost instantly, for example, that she’s not in Arkansas, as the proprietors of a sketchy convenience store insist, because they’re charging the wrong amount for cigarettes.
In a Wag The Dog turn of events, the Deplorables were flown to Eastern Europe, which apparently has a much more lenient attitude toward hunting humans for sport. It’s a misdemeanor, or punishable by a small fine. When they say that life is cheap, they’re being literal.
But The Hunt works much better as an action vehicle for Gilpin as a tough, no-nonsense warrior without a sentimental bone in her body than it does as a political satire. The glib parodies of elite lefty scum are obsessed with appearing righteous rather than behaving righteously. So it seems implausible that they’d embrace hunting or gun ownership. It similarly seems like they’d try to include some wealthy Trump supporters in the hunt for the sake of not appearing classist. Murder as recreation is one thing. Being insufficiently deferential toward the dignity of the Great American Working Man is quite another.
The Hunt closes with the revelation that Crystal May Creasey is only part of the hunt due to a misunderstanding. Gilpin’s scowling murder machine pointedly never delivers any Fox News talking points, or expresses right-wing political beliefs. The Hunt doesn’t ultimately ask audiences to root for a Trump supporter. That might alienate an audience I imagine tips heavily to the left despite Democrats being the bad guys. But making the hero a political mystery feels like a cop out.
Finally, Hillary Swank dominates the third act as the movie’s Final Boss, a crazed former executive who (SPOILERS AHEAD) lost her job due to the leaking of a text exchange where she jokes about hunting Trump supporters. She then decides to make a conspiracy theory known as “Manorgate” into a bloody reality.
Manorgate is a variation on QAnon. QAnon, in turn, represents a newfangled take on blood libel, the ancient antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to make matzos for Passover. In each iteration, the dynamic is the same: evil, outsider elitists hate poor gentiles so much that they are willing to murder them for their own sick purposes. These conspiracies depict the wealthy as so arrogant and amoral that they’re incapable of seeing the poor as human beings with dignity, whose lives have value and meaning. Instead, they see them as animals ripe for the slaughter.
The Hunt imagines what it would be like if Hillary Clinton got so annoyed by idiots online accusing her of sexually assaulting, then eating babies for the sweet Adrenochrome high, that she decided to make their hysterical fears real by actually engaging in baby rape, cannibalism, and, of course, wearing the skin of dead children as a mask. If you’re going to be accused of horrible crimes, why not just commit them? That is the dubious logic of The Hunt’s villains.
Despite Trump’s fears/hopes, The Hunt did not inflame cultural divides or cause chaos. It did not lead to violence. It did not prove very bad for our country. It didn’t make much of an impact at all. It was released fairly recently yet already feels like an irrelevant period piece.
Zobel’s film epitomizes the wishy-washy cowardice of bipartisan satire that sets out to skewer both sides and the ridiculousness and absurdity of politics but just ends up feeling toothless and strangely safe. Trump wildly overestimated the impact The Hunt would have.
That, ultimately, represents the film’s true failure. The provocateurs at Blumhouse hurled a Molotov cocktail at jaded audiences that went off with a sad fizzle.
Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Failure
