[Our thanks to Damien Taymans for the following review.]
Nathan is visiting his fiancée Claire at her family's estate. When mutilated animals are found on the terrain, Claire's grandfather, her father and her brother decide to form a hunting party. They set of into the woods with future son-in-law Nathan trudging along. A wild boar seems to be the main suspect for the carnage, but there's something far more dangerous afoot. The family also owns a chemical factory and a leak in a tank with an experimental type of fertilizer has infected the surrounding wildlife. The pollution has started a mutation in the local population of boars, who aggressively attack anything that breathes, including themselves. The family members start bickering with each other, poor Nathan is stuck in between and the boars have tasted blood.
A first-time director making a french version of Mulcahy's Razorback: chills run through the spine of the genre amateur. Recent blue-white-red movies on the land of zombies (The Horde, The Pack), of survival with monsters (Lady Blood), Nazis (Frontiers) or prehistoric comedy (Humans) sailed between the not-so- bad and the really bad. So this hunting party led by rural Burgundy against boar mutants caused some uncontrollable smile at the lips of the most skeptical.
But Prey is a pretty good film that manages the tension from a bit of ingenuity - boar's attacks are suggested by the animation of foliage and by the loud growls indicating their proximity - and a great direction. We forget the low budget which has benefited Antoine Blossier to bring to the screen this horrific rural odyssey. The Burgundy woods give way, in terms of exoticism, to the local bourgeoisie subjected to the capitalism, the manager of the pesticide company neglecting family heritage in favor the financial competitiveness.
Prey, selected at the 29th Brussels international fantastic film festival in the European competition, is one of the most decent horror movies of the french genre Nouvelle vague. With boar's growls and furtive movements in undergrowth, Blossier create a paranoiac atmosphere which is very disturbing.
Review by Damien Taymans.
Nathan is visiting his fiancée Claire at her family's estate. When mutilated animals are found on the terrain, Claire's grandfather, her father and her brother decide to form a hunting party. They set of into the woods with future son-in-law Nathan trudging along. A wild boar seems to be the main suspect for the carnage, but there's something far more dangerous afoot. The family also owns a chemical factory and a leak in a tank with an experimental type of fertilizer has infected the surrounding wildlife. The pollution has started a mutation in the local population of boars, who aggressively attack anything that breathes, including themselves. The family members start bickering with each other, poor Nathan is stuck in between and the boars have tasted blood.
A first-time director making a french version of Mulcahy's Razorback: chills run through the spine of the genre amateur. Recent blue-white-red movies on the land of zombies (The Horde, The Pack), of survival with monsters (Lady Blood), Nazis (Frontiers) or prehistoric comedy (Humans) sailed between the not-so- bad and the really bad. So this hunting party led by rural Burgundy against boar mutants caused some uncontrollable smile at the lips of the most skeptical.
But Prey is a pretty good film that manages the tension from a bit of ingenuity - boar's attacks are suggested by the animation of foliage and by the loud growls indicating their proximity - and a great direction. We forget the low budget which has benefited Antoine Blossier to bring to the screen this horrific rural odyssey. The Burgundy woods give way, in terms of exoticism, to the local bourgeoisie subjected to the capitalism, the manager of the pesticide company neglecting family heritage in favor the financial competitiveness.
Prey, selected at the 29th Brussels international fantastic film festival in the European competition, is one of the most decent horror movies of the french genre Nouvelle vague. With boar's growls and furtive movements in undergrowth, Blossier create a paranoiac atmosphere which is very disturbing.
Review by Damien Taymans.