Starring: Dakota Gorman, Todd Terry and James Austin Johnson
Directed by: Brock Bodell
Rated: R
Running Time: 91 minutes
Shudder
Our Score: 1.5 out of 5 Stars
Lena (Dakota Gorman) awakens to a trailer park nightmare. She’s alone in the back of a speeding trailer, able to make out little more than the shadows of the surrounding woods as they race down the highway. Various intercoms scattered throughout the trailer project the voice of Clive (Todd Terry), who tells Lena she’s infected after a night of camping and that he’s taking her to a hospital for treatment. That’s basically all we know.
For a while, that’s thrilling.The claustrophobic setting, Lena’s complete disorientation and an obviously untrustworthy Clive immediately hook you because “Hellcat” could go almost anywhere. Unfortunately, the more we learn, the smaller those possibilities become until the mystery feels about as confined as the trailer itself.
We get moments of exposition revealing that Lena is grieving, Clive is a conspiracy theorist and something supernatural may be happening. The problem is that “Hellcat” telegraphs its eventual reveal so aggressively that figuring it out feels less like solving a mystery and more like waiting for the movie to catch up. Once I understood what kind of story I was watching, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never really does.
The film should hinge on Terry and Gorman’s chemistry, and thankfully, they have it. Gorman does an admirable job making Lena interesting even when “Hellcat” struggles to give her an interesting arc. Terry brings an appropriately unsettling ambiguity to Clive, but the dialogue repeatedly works against both performers. Every other line from Clive seems to reiterate that he’s a good man, while Lena is frequently tasked with delivering exposition between potential escapes that inevitably fail.
That’s especially disappointing because “Hellcat” eventually slides into a supernatural genre with decades of mythology to play with. I don’t need the film to follow established rules or regurgitate what countless movies have done before it. Quite the opposite. I wanted the movie it promised during those opening minutes: something as strange, unpredictable and unique as waking up inside a speeding trailer with absolutely no idea what’s happening.
Instead, the melancholy feels unearned, the mythology underdeveloped and the tension slowly evaporates. A single-location thriller should make every inch of its confinement matter. Every noise outside should create another possibility. Every conversation should change our understanding of who’s in danger and who can be trusted. “Hellcat” gradually does the opposite.
The right pieces are here for a taut, tense and claustrophobic 91 minutes, but “Hellcat” rarely capitalizes on them. The trailer stops feeling like a place filled with terrifying possibilities and simply starts feeling small. Unfortunately, so does the movie.