Sheep Thrills: Linden Gets Under Your Skin with Slow Burn Thriller

Canada’s Shawn Linden certainly leaves a lasting impression with his third outing, Hunter Hunter, assembling an intriguing cast for a simmering exercise on evils lurking in the woods. While the parameters are certainly familiar and some niggling details concerning characterizations tend to distract, a lead performance from Camille Sullivan moves the narrative along from restless anxiety to full on freak fest. Borrowing thematically and aesthetically from 1970s American horror classics, Linden packs an unexpected punch in the final throes which arguably eclipses the overarching conversation on the narrative. But for many horror films which tend to falter in the third act, Linden delivers a grueling salve.

Joseph (Devon Sawa) and Anne (Camille Sullivan) are fur trappers who live deep within the woods with their 12-year-old daughter Renee (Summer H. Howell). Their livelihood is a dwindling one, and the furs they sell in the nearest town bring in less and less money. Anne believes it’s time to reconsider their future by selling their land, and also enroll their daughter in school. This sentiment becomes more pronounced when it appears a rogue wolf has been stealing animals out of their traps. Joseph proclaims he will hunt the wolf and solve these troubles…but along the way he discovers something else in the woods.

Some of the more important subplots of Hunter Hunter tend to fall by the wayside, such as the nagging reality of whether Joseph and Anne own their land. The suggestion of these questions alludes to Anne being left eternally in the dark regarding her husband’s choices, whose family purportedly owned the land paired with his decision to pursue a dangerous predator he knows more about than he lets on. The ambiguity of his background oscillates between this questionable revelation and his own social anxiety, with Linden painting him as the outdoorsy pariah akin to the subject of Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). But there’s little character development for Sawa as Joseph, who ruggedly skins animals, teaches his daughter to identify animal fecal matter and chain smokes like the dickens. Initially, Sullivan seems a bit out of place, a bit too coiffed and mannered for a woman living on the outskirts whose reactions and behaviors instead relay the fears of an amateur. Linden allows Anne’s perspective to take over, and when Joseph doesn’t come back from his hunt, she’s ruffled by the injured stranger suddenly appearing on her land (Nick Stahl in one of his first film appearances since 2014).

Tonal awkwardness transpires whenever Linden switches to the local law enforcement, who play like watered down remnants of Coen Bros. comedy, though interactions with other “yuppie” locals drive home the theme of animals being slaughtered in their own natural environment because human laziness results in a disruption of a harmonious cohabitation when animal life responds accordingly to new, convenient food supplies.

The idea of the ‘rogue’ wolf is tested a bit too directly when Anne has a screaming match with the creature we initially believe to be the culprit, and an enjoyable but overly leading score from Kevin Cronin goes into hyperdrive here with heavy lifting. Eventually, this ends up being a Last House on the Left (1972) scenario. Both Stahl and Sawa feel well-cast, but Sullivan steps out as best in show by the final frames for a gruesome, grisly finale. Although the diegetic use of the track “Hypnotized Narcissist” by Christian Sinding Soendergaard is arguably clunky considering how it’s administered, it allows for a significantly eerie climax, one which might not equal the unforgettable finale of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) but comes incredibly close to evoking a similar effective impression.

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆