Hunter takes aim at the shocking climax

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This article was published 12/12/2020 (2081 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Filmed in the fall of 2019, the movie Hunter Hunter comes with a different kind of parental advisory from Winnipeg director Shawn Linden.

“I’ve already told my mother that she’s not supposed to watch the last five minutes,” says Linden, 43.

An unapologetic horror movie set in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield, the film plunks us into a cabin owned by modern-day fur trapper Joseph Mersault (Devon Sawa), his wife Anne (Camille Sullivan), and their daughter Renée (Summer H. Howell). The patriarch resolutely tries his best to live off the land, earning just a little money from the fur pelts Anne is obliged to sell at a local store while teaching his daughter the trade. The economic hardship is compounded when a wolf intrudes on their world, eating the animals Joseph has trapped and terrorizing Anne and Renée.

When an even more dangerous predator arrives on the scene, Joseph decides to hunt the hunter.

Linden has directed a couple of feature films before this, the 2007 noir/sci-fi hybrid Nobody, and the 2012 revenge thriller The Good Lie. Hunter Hunter is easily Linden’s most assured film, a wilderness thriller with an axe-sharp edge that powerfully manifests itself in those last few minutes.

Linden got lucky in a few ways making the film. The production could have suffered a calamitous shutdown due to the freak October snowstorm that took out trees throughout southern Manitoba.

“I think it was the first force majeure that I’ve experienced being on a film set in 15 years of work,” Linden says in a phone interview from his home.

“It locked down every other production but ours I guess,” he says. “It was the very end of shooting. We shot all of our exteriors already.

“It was really lucky because we got to shoot a lot of vivid autumn scenery and that storm just ripped every single leaf off of every tree where we were shooting,” he says. (The film was shot around Pinawa, Libau and Birds Hill Park.)

“The cast and crew gave a Herculean effort, especially on that day,” he says. “We didn’t have a lot of room for error. If we had lost one day, it would’ve been nearly catastrophic.”

To look at the movie is to see that it must have been more difficult than the average film.

“The cast and crew were all amped up to do a job that I would’ve hated,” Linden laughs. “It was out in the middle of nowhere and there’s no electricity. There’s no running water. We would have to be staying in these cabins and congregate by the side of a cliff in a rainstorm and things like that.

“We lived in the inhospitable nature that we we were trying to portray,” he says.

“If I put myself in their shoes, I would be going home,” he says. “From the very start, I was just so grateful to have all these people that could jump in with both both feet.”

The two most recognizable stars in the film, Devon Sawa (Final Destination) and Nick Stahl (Terminator 3) were likewise game for challenge, something Linden appreciated.

“Devon’s Canadian. He’s from B.C. so he was pretty accustomed to it, although they’re both L.A. people now,” Linden says. “If Nick ever endured any hardships, he never let it be known. He was a trooper.

“It’s really fun having professionals that are like that,” he says. “They’ve been around it for so long, the extra gears don’t need oiling to get things going. They’re plug-and-play.”

Linden says he was inspired to write the film back in 2007, when he found himself in a German forest while on a layover coming from a film festival in Belgium.

“It just caused creative connections in my head and by the time I had gotten off the flight, I conceived of the story,” he says, admitting it went through many iterations in subsequent years.

“The story has been optioned by different companies for 12 years now, so it’s got undergone a whole series of revisions and updates without actually losing that core bit,” he says.

Another inspiration? Movies that deliver a knockout punch in the very last scene.

“I’ve always loved films that have a build-up towards the end, which is how a real climax should be,” he says. “I’ve always loved the Dutch (movie) The Vanishing which was made around 1988 which has an ending that just had me standing up slack-jawed and wondering what the hell just happened. It was virtually a bloodless story and it had still one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen on film.

“Takashi Miike’s Audition was another one that I was consciously emulating. It builds up to a really horrific ending that isn’t gratuitous. The circumstances of the story have led it to a violence that seems conceivable. It’s not out of nowhere.”

Hunter Hunter will commence streaming on Apple TV and iTunes on Friday, Dec. 18.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing