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Stars: Camille Rowe, Jeremy Scippio, Stasa Stanic | Written by Franck Khalfoun, Glen Freyer | Directed by Franck Khalfoun

Night of the Hunted, the latest film from Franck Khalfoun is a remake, but not of Jean Rollin’s 1980 paranoid thriller of the same name, though that would be a logical choice for rebooting in these conspiracy-riddled times. Instead, he and co-writer Glen Freyer have reworked and updated Rubén Ávila Calvo and David R.L.’s 2015 Spanish thriller Night of the Rat.

This film begins in a hotel room where Alice is talking to her husband on the phone, we hear something about an appointment with a fertility specialist before she hurriedly hangs up as John enters the room. Driving back to town in the pre-dawn darkness they make a stop for gas despite Jiohn’s insistence that he filled the tank the day before. Alice goes in to grab some snacks, and as...

A woman stops for petrol and is stalked by an unknown shooter in Franck Khalfoun’s nihilistic parable

“Godisnowhere,” says a church billboard, the vantage point from which an anonymous sniper rains down high-velocity death on a helpless filling station in this nihilistic but finely honed thriller. Do you read that as “now here” or “nowhere”? That could determine whether you’re a vengeful Maga absolutist or floundering liberal relativist in director Franck Khalfoun’s state-of-the nation litmus test, which inadvertently plays out as a shell-shocked Trump-era version of Clerks.

Alice (Camille Rowe), who runs social media for a pharma company, is returning from a business convention, with a fertility appointment with her partner waiting back at home. But something is wrong in her life: her colleague John (Jeremy Scippio) is sharing her hotel-room bed but, as they hit the road in the dark, she shuts down his attempts at banter.

Writer/Director Franck Khalfoun, the French filmmaker behind P2 and Maniac (2012), knows a thing or two about brutal horror and wringing palpable tension from it. His latest, Night of the Hunted, adapts the 2015 Spanish horror-thriller La Noche del Ratón for a grim single-location feature that taps into the tumultuous social climate. Khalfoun continues his streak for delivering nail-biting suspense through escalating violence, though the film’s messaging may prove divisive.

Alice (The Deep House’s Camille Rowe) sleepily video chats with her husband as she gets ready in her hotel room. She ends the call mere moments before her lover, John (Jeremy Scippio), enters the frame, avoiding catastrophe within seconds. After pausing to collect herself, Alice pushes John onward as they head out in the middle of the night to start their travels home. They don’t get far down the road, as a stop at a rural gas station...