Night Hunter review: like Mindhunter given a full-frontal lobotomy
Dir: David Raymond. Cast: Henry Cavill, Stanley Tucci, Ben Kingsley, Alexandra Daddario, Minka Kelly, Brendan Fletcher, Nathan Fillion. 15 cert, 97 mins
Night Hunter is a B-list police thriller so loony and crass it's almost fascinating, like some sort of accidental spin-off from Twin Peaks. As far as you can work out, the film isn’t aiming for slippery Lynchian dream logic or head-scratching dead ends, just stumbling into that arena through sheer confusion.
The tone is set in an ominous first sequence, flashily shot under the sodium lights of a highway crossing at night. A young girl is running away, apparently from a speeding truck, or maybe a male pursuer we briefly espy. Before you know it, she has plopped off the bridge like a stricken doll, but the grammar of the scene is so weird and broken you wonder if demonic forces are loose in the edit suite.
There’s nothing anyone can do about Henry Cavill, as a grumpy cop and protective dad embroiled in the investigation, whose one character note – epic surliness – his performance straps on like a suit of bark.
Ben Kingsley looks equally cross to even be here, all but head-butting the camera as a bereaved former judge who’s gone rogue, dangling a teenage temptress (Eliana Jones) as bait to catch sexual predators. Rinsing the prowlers’ bank accounts to compensate their victims, he tidily castrates them on motel beds, then wakes them up to break the news.
Still, no one really minds. When Cavill finds the dungeon lair of a giggling pervert played by Brendan Fletcher – all coloured bulbs, locked cells and Christmas songs stuck on a loop – this incurable man-child is taken into custody and interrogated, badly, by Alexandra Daddario’s psych-profiler. Enlivened only by brief moments of Stanley Tucci yelling at a paedophile, these scenes suggest the Netflix series Mindhunter given a full-frontal lobotomy.
For reasons I can’t disclose, Night Hunter gets exactly twice as terrible when it coughs up an abysmally lurid twist, “explaining” plot developments we had fully written off as just the film being out of its mind. We’re taken out onto a frozen lake near Winnipeg for an all-action finale, but if the sex-crime procedural is itself thin ice, this whole film is like something belched out onto it by a flatulent volcano.
Subscriber reward: Click here to save up to 40% on tickets at more than 250 cinemas across the UK
