Annick Blanc’s Hunting Daze is one of several films at this year’s SXSW that looks at how women fit into traditionally male spaces, and it also happens to be the bloodiest.
Nina (Nahéma Ricci), an exotic dancer, gets in a fight with her boss after leaving a gig at a men’s hunting weekend. She asks one of her clients if she can go back to the cabin and wait for the next train home. He reluctantly agrees and takes her back to hang out with the bachelors while they kill time.
At first it feels like a female empowerment movie when Nina returns to the cabin unexpected but not entirely unwelcome, the other men are hesitant to accept her presence. But when she promises them that she can do anything they can do, quickly becoming the belle of the ball as she does so, “Hunting Daze” becomes something more than that.
Stripped of expectations of femininity or decorum, Nina immediately becomes “one of the boys,” shooting guns and tracking deer and performing absurd childlike initiation rites in the name of brotherhood. She is free, she acts free; for one brief moment in time, all too soon interrupted by a knock on the door.
Frantic, rambling and afraid, their visitor changes everything about the vibe which was already unstable because someone had just gotten accidentally hit in the head with an axe. The situation quickly turns chaotic as their desperate search for a next step leads them deeper into darkness than they ever could have imagined possible.
But “Hunting Daze” isn’t really a horror film so much as it’s a deliberately hazy thriller about choices specifically those made by men who find themselves suddenly accountable for life-or-death decisions when things stop being fun. Not everyone can party forever, sometimes it has to end by force. In this case, that crew struggles mightily to find their way out of the literal and metaphorical woods, with a varying degree of success.
Annick Blanc, the film’s writer/director, finds her center with Nina but the men around her play just as important a role in bringing things to a head. As they search for an answer to their ever-worsening conundrum, it is Nina who serves as the group’s moral compass, she is the eye of this emotional hurricane. It’s not a job she asked for or wanted, it’s not even one she was trained for. But it is exactly the kind of heavy lifting that society often forces women to do in times of crisis. And like most women in her position, Nina finds herself struggling to be heard even though she has more than earned her right to equal consideration by “proving” herself time and again.
Ricci does more than keep up with the men in her group, she outperforms them. She is much smaller than any of the guys, but this doesn’t make her feel weak or helpless. In a bid to evade accountability for what went down over the weekend, all the men blame each other while drunk except Nina who stands tall and tries to create an atmosphere of responsibility even through their collective intoxication it really is all about her. And as we inch closer to that mind-blowing endgame you find yourself wondering why they let her take charge after everything else that had happened.
Hunting Days may be slightly slower paced and lesser plotted compared to other films chosen for midnight viewing, but its strange imagery, every now and again slipping into surreal hallucinations, makes it an uncommonly successful movie. In terms of delivering unexpectednesses alongside rabid clutching at straws attempts towards exit points one would associate with thrillers within this genre yes indeed! However also fits just as easily into any other type of storyline there might be.
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