Night Hunter (2019)

Night Hunter arrives with the confidence of a film that believes it has something to say, and departs having said nothing at all. David Raymond's Minnesota procedural concerns a detective, a vigilante judge, and a serial abductor who turns out to be one of a pair of identical twins, one murderous, one genuinely disabled. That reveal is the film's entire intellectual architecture, and it is deployed as a gotcha, not as an inquiry. The disabled brother exists to be hugged into an icy lake. We are asked to feel the tragedy of a plot device. This is not advocacy, and it is not exploitation exactly. It is a screenwriter reaching for the nearest available twist.

The social register here sits close to zero. The cast is white by default, with Mpho Koaho appearing briefly and without comment. No character is gay. No one discusses race, no one mentions the climate, and the economy is never a subject. Alexandra Daddario's profiler and Minka Kelly's detective hold jobs, but the film has no thesis about women beyond their utility as victims, colleagues, and a closing romantic beat. The snowy setting is weather, not warning. There is no sermon, no lesson, no moral instruction of any kind, which is its own kind of achievement for 2019.

What remains is a convoluted thriller that critics compared unfavorably to the films it imitates, and they were correct to do so. The film's only progressive gesture is accidental: it hands a substantial role to a disabled performer and then treats him as furniture. We can credit the gesture. We cannot credit the intent. The whole enterprise sinks beneath the ice alongside its twins, and the water is very cold, and no one learns anything, and that is that. A weary verdict, delivered without pleasure: this is a film of no convictions whatsoever, which at least makes it honest about its emptiness.

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