SXSW 2024 Review: HUNTING DAZE, This Party Ends In Blood

One of several films at this year’s SXSW that explore the effects of women’s presence in traditionally male spaces, Annick Blanc’s Hunting Daze is among the bloodiest of the lot.

When exotic dancer Nina (Nahéma Ricci) 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 begrudgingly agrees and takes her back to hang out with the bachelors as they pass the time.

What begins as a bonding experience in which Nina unexpectedly finds a sense of belonging in this sea of testosterone turns on a dime when a surprise visitor turns up at the cabin. Frantic, rambling, and afraid, the visitor’s presence alters the vibe dramatically and soon a freak accident turns their rowdy party into a desperate search for a next step and the situation turns chaotic.

At first Hunting Daze feels like a female empowerment film, as Nina returns to the cabin – unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome – the other men are hesitant to accept her presence. However, when she promises them that she can and will do anything that they do to fit in, she quickly becomes the belle of the ball.

Stripped of expectations of femininity and decorum, Nina quickly becomes “one of the boys,” hunting, shooting, performing ridiculous, childish initiation rites, all in the name of fraternity. She feels free, she acts free, and for a briefest of moments she is free. When the second outsider emerges from the forest in distress, Nina and the boys must decide how to handle it, and that’s when the façade of freedom begins to crack.

Not a horror movie in any traditional sense, Hunting Daze is more of a deliberately hazy thriller about choices. Nina’s journey of liberation is suddenly derailed when life and death choices are forced upon the group. The party has to end sometime, and in this case, it’s not by choice as this crew struggles to find a path out of the literal and metaphorical woods in which they find themselves, each struggling with their own conscience to varying degrees of success.

Writer/director Annick Blanc certainly finds her center with Nina, but the men around her play just as much a part in the climax of the story as anyone. As the group attempt to find a solution to their worsening conundrum, it is Nina who serves as the group’s moral center, the eye of an emotional hurricane. It’s not a job she wanted or expected, but it does mimic the heavy emotional burden that the world puts on women to carry through crises every day of their lives. Nina is no different, and like women around the world, she also finds it difficult to be heard, even in an environment where she has objectively proved herself worthy of equality.

Ricci more than hold her own against the men in the group. Physically smaller than all of her male counterparts by a significant degree, she never feels weak or overpowered. While the men in the group attempt to avoid responsibility for the events of the weekend, Nina stands up and attempts to create an atmosphere of accountability, even through their mutual drunken haze. It really is her show, and as the film draws closer to its shocking climax, she is the one at the wheel.

Perhaps a bit more deliberately paced and thinly plotted than a traditional midnight movie selection, Blanc’s surreal visuals and occasional lapses into a dreamlike state make Hunting Daze an unusual and effective feature. The film delivers the kind of unexpected moments and frantic grasping for escape that one might expect in a genre thriller, though it could just as easily fit into any other narrative category.