By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Gabriel Black’s It Hunts is a film with a distinct visual style made all the more impressive by the fact that the movie was made on a micro-budget. Unfortunately however, It Hunts doesn’t come together as a structured narrative as much as I hoped it would after a strong opening ten minutes.
The plot of the movie, follows Casey ( Izzy Martinez) a listless insomniac stuck in a dead end job and a failing relationship. One night he suffers from a nightmare and develops a sense of paranoia that something or someone is out to get him. From this point he’s plagued by reoccurring nightmares and visions that he is desperately trying to find the origin of.
Shot in Miami It Hunts has a washed neo-noir visual palate reminiscent of Heat and To Live And Die In LA, that is just beautiful to look at, especially during the movie’s opening sequence. Black plays with light and shadow in an hallucinatory style that complements the movie’s tone.
Running at an hour and thirty eight minutes, the problem with It Hunts is that it tries to cram too many sub-plots into an already busy narrative. This has the knock-on effect slowing down the movie’s pace through trying to cram in these diversions, which in turn both draws focus away from the main narrative and makes it more confusing to follow at the same time.
Izzy Martinez gives a likeable performance as the movie’s protagonist Casey, effectively portraying his lack of sleep induced paranoia and frustrations with his circumstances in life. Although J.J Crowne is solid as Casey’s best friend/mentor figure Fred, the rest of the supporting cast are largely lacklustre and forgettable.
Overall, there is a germ of a good movie in It Hunts but scattered stop-start pacing and lack of an interesting supporting cast stop the movie from living up to its true potential. In an opposite day style twist, this is a movie which could have benefitted from being forty minutes or so longer, so that Black would have had more time to fully flesh out the narrative.
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