REVIEW | Lisa Fremont
- Director: Brock Bodell
- Writer: Brock Bodell
- Stars: Dakota Gorman, Todd Jerry, James Austin Johnson, Jordan Mullins
A young woman wakes up in a moving trailer with no recollection of how she got there. After searching the trailer and realizing the windows are blacked out, and the door is chained from the outside, a voice begins speaking to her from an overhead speaker. From here on out, we join Lena, the young woman in question, as she tries to decipher why and how she ended up in this situation.
Writer/director Brock Bodell expertly toys with genre expectations and tropes in Hellcat, a claustrophobic chamber piece that explores classic themes of family and survival while also slyly commenting on the modern consumption of information that is fueled by nothing more than fear. Much like a virus, unfounded ideas quickly turn into insidious “facts” when not properly contained. Lena (Gorman) is told by the overhead voice that she has been infected with a virus, and he is the only one who can get her to safety before it’s too late. But which one of them is truly suffering from an incurable virus? The woman who was kidnapped from her campsite or the man who spends too much time listening to a radio station that deals in the kind of conspiracy theories that use the term “China virus”?
Dakota Gorman is asked to carry a heavy load as the only character onscreen for much of the film, and she more than delivers. Lena is an independent woman, grappling with grief and deciding how to move into her next chapter of life when she finds herself kidnapped by Clive (Todd Terry), a man who, despite abducting her, locking her in a trailer, transporting her across state lines, and a few other truly terrifying things, claims that he is doing all of this to save her life.
The entirety of the film does not take place in the trailer, and the movie does lose a titch of momentum when this happens, but this shift allows us to truly understand and empathize with the characters. A smarmy, small-town cop joins the story to really take this shit show up to an 11: while this feels a bit too much, it succinctly drives home the underlying theme of how we get our news and facts these days. While seasoned horror fans will easily guess what clock Lena is racing against, the outcome of her story is beyond anything I would have expected or dreamed of. Hellcat is a standout debut that expertly utilizes very little to show off quite a lot.
Streaming on Shudder August 14
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