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 epitomé 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.
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