Is Nina (Nahéma Ricci) on her own in the wilderness? That’s the first question in the provocative and left-field horror-thriller Hunting Daze, a film which offers rather subtle moral questions in amidst its much more brutal, alarming developments. Nina, then, is at first framed as though she’s alone; actually, she’s part of a group, and her and her companions have broken down on a remote road somewhere in Quebec, where they’re waiting on a friend, or rather an acquaintance, to arrive to give them some fuel. It’s just as well he arrives when he does, because tempers are frayed: after a spiteful discussion about who is or isn’t a ‘whore’ and a fierce fightback by Nina, her friends abandon her, leaving her in a place where there may well be no passers-by or public transport for days. Kevin, the rescuer (Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi) only knows Nina from her work as a stripper, but he’s her only hope – as much as he isn’t too keen on taking her with him to the hunting cabin/stag weekend he’s on. He acquiesces, though; he can’t just leave her there. Relieved, she accompanies him.
My heart initially sank when the film’s script began loading up on gendered epithets, with ‘whore’, ‘stripper’, ‘virgin’, ‘damsel in distress’ and ‘witch’ arriving in quick succession, but this isn’t simply a cautionary tale about what could happen to a woman in the woods with a testosterone-jacked hunting party (as per the poster, actually). Nonetheless, the film does feel like tension is steadily brewing: true to the film’s well-chosen English language title, the film does feel like a ‘daze’, with its aerial shots and dreamy music overlaying the more expected boorish bachelor party behaviour. But, woman or not, the men seem to accept Nina, so long as she agrees to live like one of them, hunting with them, eating and drinking with them, and agreeing to whatever bonding activities they come up with along the way, replete with philosophical chit-chat about life, death and destiny. Nina seems equal to it. She’s no pushover; we’ve seen that already. And, perhaps, her profession has taught her coping skills for dealing with rambunctious male groups: for now, she’s one of the boys, and she seems to take to it very well.
As one of them, she goes off hunting the next day and it’s a successful outing, but this tentative and newly-formed social group is a delicate ecosystem, and things get more complicated when Kevin returns with another waif and stray, Dudos (Noubi Ndiaye). A gang of people, some of them strangers, all under the influence, brandishing guns and hanging out on the distant outskirts of society itself: things are about to go wrong, but again, not according to expected parameters.
To reiterate, because it’s important, Hunting Daze is a lot more thoughtful and thought-provoking than the initial sum of its parts suggests. This is a very heady film and a looping, fragmenting and hallucinatory experience, even before any substances pop up. There’s lots of napping and dreaming, too. I think it works well not only because it avoids simply travelling down familiar routes, but also because, at heart, none of these people are simply bad or very obviously flawed. There are no supervillains or sudden revelations of dark, dangerous pasts. The men and woman here are the sum of lives which may well have been, for the most part, pretty normal. Perhaps Nina’s familiarity with people’s failings has been honed by sex work, whereby she has had to fight or develop a tough skin in order to survive, but once she’s shown she’s equal to the men’s edict that she be part of their pack, she does what she said she would do. For the biggest part of its running time, the film achieves an interesting blend of dreamy camaraderie and more jagged, in places simpler commentary and symbolism, like an existential frat party – but it works, and the film’s precipitous atmosphere is well sustained.
Performances are excellent from everyone here. There’s not much dialogue, but the character development is plausible and engaging, and the physicality of the roles is really well handled by director Annick Blanc. Whilst gender (and race) do figure in this situation, it’s superseded by something even bigger, I’d argue. The film is all about the horrors of finding – and potentially being excluded from – your tribe, in an alienating and unforgiving world. The Canadian wilderness, genuinely vast and largely empty of people, serves as a fascinating backdrop for all of this, allowing the hunting party to operate as a microcosm of alienation, in a film which is provocative and nasty in carefully selective ways.
Hunting Daze (2024) will be released on 14th January 2025.