00:00Sean Ashmore is determined to find the serial killer known as The Huntsman, a thriller that's
00:04more like a crime scene itself. Ashmore plays an ICU nurse who is caring for Garrett Dillahunt,
00:10who is the prime suspect in the murder of six women by the titular killer and is in a coma
00:14after being shot in the head. When Dillahunt wakes from his coma, his wife Elizabeth Mitchell
00:19hires Ashmore to take care of Dillahunt as he recovers in their home, but Ashmore has a secret
00:24motivation of his own. So this is based on the 2022 novel by Judas Sanders and is directed by
00:29Kyle Kawika Harris, who previously held action films like Out of Exile and Reverence. Harris also
00:34co-wrote the script, but something must have been lost in translation because surely the book must
00:40have been better than this. It's fairly obvious what The Huntsman is trying to be. It must be something
00:44like The Sons of the Lambs or Prisoners, complete with a Snow White inspired killer who poisons their
00:49victims with apples and cuts out their hearts, which is a fairy tale element that this movie
00:54largely ignores. But the big problem with the film is that it fails as a whodunit,
00:58as it's very clear who the killer is early on, especially if you're an experienced sleuth,
01:04and does such a poor job hiding it that the audience will guess correctly long before they're
01:09unmasked. Harris tries to obfuscate the obvious by instead just concealing a lot of basic details
01:14about the characters, but this makes things more just confusing than intriguing and suspenseful,
01:19and the attempts to up red herring Ashmore as the killer are particularly transparent and given
01:23it would make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Rarely have I seen a movie where I genuinely
01:28couldn't understand why things were happening at any given moment, and yet I simultaneously knew
01:32exactly where it was heading. And this has huge impacts on the storytelling because the movie
01:37withholds so much that it's hard to engage with. Ashmore is ostensibly the main character,
01:42but he's not a compelling lead because he doesn't really do an awful lot, and the only thing that we
01:46do know is that he's an unstable Afghanistan vet with PTSD who keeps a gun on him. I think there's
01:52meant to be a relationship that develops between him and Dillahunt, who's pretty good despite the
01:56fact that he's the fastest recovering coma patient this side of Steven Seagal and hard to kill, but the
02:01movie doesn't centralize it, while Mitchell's artist's wife is so horny she keeps giving everyone
02:06the bedroom eyes. Meanwhile Jesse Schramm is the detective trying to find the killer, but her scenes
02:11don't really amount to anything, aside from one very ill-placed use of the Wilhelm stream in a dramatic
02:17moment. The acting and the cinematography is all pretty decent, it's just the storytelling doesn't
02:22work and the pacing is painfully slow, as the movie drags itself to a conclusion that's over before you
02:27can even blink, and you just think to yourself, yeah I knew it was there an hour ago.
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