In Hunt Her, Kill Her, Karen’s (Natalie Terrazino) first shift as the night janitor at a furniture factory turns into a waking nightmare when she’s attacked by a group of masked men. With the doors locked and the phone lines cut, she has no choice but to fight back using whatever she can lay her hands on. That’s the sort of no-frills premise that a low-budget slasher can absolutely thrive on, but odd tonal choices and a general lack of suspense mean that the film never really manages to get the blood pumping the way the filmmakers intend.
The promising opening sequence briskly establishes the geography of the film’s hunting ground, while also providing a basic blueprint of Karen herself. The phone calls to her young daughter reveal that she’s a single mother doing what she can to get the bills paid, while offhand allusions to a bad ex and an old injury paint the rest of the picture. With only a few lines, Terrazino effectively portrays Karen as someone who just wants to do her job, clock out, and get back to her kid. And she’ll pretty much do whatever it takes to make that happen, whether that means mopping out a gross bathroom or throttling someone with a roll of barbed wire.
While cleaning out the bathroom, Karen is cornered by a pair of menacing male colleagues who quickly reveal themselves to be friends of her ex-husband. The threat of sexual assault that lingers over the whole encounter mostly feels like a cheap way to ratchet up the tension, but it also points to a bigger problem when Karen’s attackers turn up shortly afterward.
There are two main reasons to mask your villain in a horror flick: either you’re looking, a la Scream, to Scooby-Doo the audience with a climatic de-masking, or you’re trying to make the assailant appear as an emotionally impregnable force of pure malevolence along the lines of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. The first approach provides a personal, discomfortingly human motivation for the horrors that are carried out on screen, while the second confronts the audience with a world where no reason is needed for evil to occur.
But by making no effort to conceal who Karen’s attackers are from the start, nor doing anything to complicate their motivation or backstory, Hunt Her, Kill Her gives itself nothing to uncover. Karen’s attackers are just bad guys doing awful things for obvious, uninteresting reasons. And the fact that they communicate with each other like henchmen out of a video game doesn’t help.
Perhaps as a result of this lack of interiority, the film is mostly fixated on the physical form of its characters and the various ways they can be torn apart. The warehouse setting is the perfect playground for horror filmmakers to traffic in scares, stacked as it is with industrial equipment that’s just begging to be repurposed in the most sinister ways. But aside from a few clever flourishes involving claw hammers and Sellotape, directors Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen don’t exactly pour much imaginative vigor into their story. Those in search of pulpy thrills will find their bloodlust largely unsated by the time day breaks on this night of horrors.
Hunt Her, Kill Her goes out of its way to emphasize the messy, miserable nastiness of each kill. But even when one of Karen’s deadly plans comes off perfectly, the moment of grisly triumph is sapped of any enjoyment by the way her victim continues to lie there, gasping, gurgling, and clinging to life. There’s no real catharsis to her vengeful violence, just a lot of blood and pain.
It’s hard to say what the effect of this gruesome realism is supposed to be. One kill involving a toilet plunger initially achieves a morbid sort of humor, only to then go back for seconds and draw out the scene to make sure that nobody is left laughing. More functionally speaking, Hunt Her, Kill Her simply isn’t tight enough to maintain the tension that it seeks to create. The cuts aren’t quite well timed enough to make the jump scares effective or the life-or-death struggles feel especially desperate. Ultimately, the film finds all the pieces for a simple but effective slasher lying about its barren factory but struggles to weld them into a memorable whole.
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