Netflix is set to remove an action-thriller that has been called “the most talked about movie” of 2020. The Hunt is a 2020 American action-horror film. The writer and director have said that the film is intended as a satire on the profound political divide between the American left and right.
It is about a group of elites who kidnap working-class people to hunt them. The 12 strangers wake up in a remote clearing with no idea where they are, until they decide to fight back. The cast includes two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, Betty Gilpin (Glow), Emma Roberts (American Horror Story), Ethan Suplee (My Name is Earl), Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Ike Barinholtz (The Studio) and Macon Blair (Oppenheimer).
The film’s trailer received backlash from some in the conservative media for portraying supporters of Donald Trump being hunted by liberals.
Trump also issued a tweet in August 2019, criticising the film industry while stating, “The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos”; although Trump did not specify the name of the film, news outlets said it was most likely a reference to The Hunt.
The Trump controversy led to the film dubbing itself in its marketing “the most talked about movie of the year no one’s actually seen”.
Kyle Smith, writing in the National Review, argued that the film has a right-wing, anti-liberal tone that conservative critics of its trailer had misinterpreted.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 57% based on 276 reviews, with an average rating of 5.9/10. The site’s critics’ consensus reads: “The Hunt is successful enough as a darkly humorous action thriller, but it shoots wide of the mark when it aims for timely social satire.”
On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 50 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating “mixed or average” reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “C+” on an A+ to F scale.
The Wall Street Journal said: “This gleeful, gross-out gorefest looks as tacky and violent as its trackdown plot would suggest, and lives up to certain parts of its bad reputation. It is also funny, genuinely topical, extremely shrewd and, heaven help us, slyly wise.”