TL;DR – It commits one of the most cinematic of crimes: it makes a film about a bear on a slashing spree dull.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I was sent a screener of this film.

Savage Hunt Review Introduction –

Unfortunately, today, we are looking at a film that flounders at almost every single possibility. Partly because of the budget, I assume, and also because the narrative and the characters are written in such a way that I found every single one of them insufferable before the end credits rolled.   

So, to set the scene, we open on a forest being cut down to build a new resort and spa. But deep in these woods might lurk something that you don’t want to disturb, something that might be stalking you, hunting you, and if you are not careful, killing you. When a man walks into the construction site covered in blood and clearly mauled by an animal, the local rangers get called in, shutting down the site, but not even they were prepared for what is out there.

The Bear

While I’ll be quite negative overall, I’ll start with a rare positive that other than the things I am about to mention, it is generally a competently shot film. If I had to pick an example of this, I would say that they have a good eye for the strength of flares as a visual medium. However, for a film that is putting a murderous, rampaging bear front and centre, the fact that the bear is an abject failure is almost singularly disqualifying. A lot of the film uses documentary or staged filming of a bear, and when you have a bear by itself moving through the forest, it looks great. However, the second they need to have the bear do anything outside of that footage, it falls apart.

There are moments at the start where I think we get a very unbelievable puppet for all the close-up shots. But the rest of the occurrences are digital insertions, and I am sorry, but nearly every single one of them fails. They are not properly composited into the shot. There are times when the bear is shot, and it looks like the bullet hole is floating in the air, and other times when it seems like they didn’t know what a bear looks like. I know this is most likely a budget issue, and if they had more time and money, the bear would have looked better. However, when it is your central antagonist, you can’t miss, and this film missed all the time.      

The Characters and Narrative

If the budget was holding the effects back, you can always help soften that blow by having an interesting story, or at least characters that you care about. Unfortunately, this film falls flat on both of those counts. I did not care about a single character in this entire movie. Not one. None of them is likable or in any way endearing. It doesn’t help that they’re written with the decision-making skills of, well I was going to call them fools, but I think that would be offensive to fools. For example, when a car comes across a wounded person on a forest track, and then the mother asks the daughter (and to be clear, they all know about the bear) to walk down the road in the forest so they can get a better reception to call the police, instead of putting the person in the car and just driving. It is moments like this that almost had me rooting for the bear, if the bear worked.

There is a lot of ‘conflict’ in this film, but it has all the subtlety of a fence post to the head. It is conflict for the sake of conflict, just so there could be some vague motivations for the characters to throw themselves in harm’s way for no apparent reason. Let’s sprinkle a little bit of hunters v environmentalists, or corporations v small towns, but not actually explore that. We have the very divorcing family plus the secretly divorced family, and none of it matters in any way that isn’t frustratingly stupid. The film is full of these odd disconnects that keep pulling you out of the film. Like when the bear rampages through the main street of a Montana town, and no one shoots it … In Montana.   

Conclusion

In the end, do we recommend Savage Hunt? Unfortunately, no, I tried to find some sort of redeeming quality to the film, but the more it went on, the more I wanted it over. Have you watched Savage Hunt? Let us know what you thought in the comments below. If you liked Savage Hunt, we would recommend Cocaine Bear to you because even though it is a similarly silly film, they do get the bear right.  

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Savage Hunt
Directed by – Roel Reiné
Written by – Chad Law & Christopher Jolley
Music by – Roel Reiné
Cinematography by – Roel Reiné
Edited by – Radu Ion
Production/Distribution Companies – Midwest, Pro Cinema, Film Bridge International, Rebel Film & Defiant Screen Entertainment
Starring – James Oliver Wheatley, Fotina Papatheodorou, Priya Blackburn, Noush Skaugen, Anthony Barclay, Colin Mace, Skye Little Wing Dimov Saw, Katrin Vankova, Jonas Talkington & Martin Zannato  
Rating – Australia: MA15+