A woman wakes up in a moving camper trailer with a strange wound on her arm, unaware how she got there in Hellcat, the feature directorial debut by writer/director Brock Bodell (Ultrasound). That setup gives way to a fast-moving chamber piece that hinges on the element of surprise, specifically designed for audiences to go in knowing as little as possible.
Bodell plays it close to the vest, toying with subgenres and expectations to send viewers on an unexpected horror journey.
The woman plunged into a survival nightmare is Lena (Dakota Gorman), a young woman who’d been camping alone, only to awaken in the camper. It’s an alarming situation that naturally puts Lena on the defensive, especially when the camper’s driver, Clive (Todd Terry), explains over the intercom that he can’t let her go with that gnarly injury on her arm. Clive seems well-intentioned, and his warnings about that wound becoming infected ring true, but the stressful standoff between captive and driver escalates, and reality begins to blur in increasingly dangerous ways.
Hellcat smartly keeps it simple, with most of the self-contained story taking place almost entirely within the camper and resting on Gorman’s capable shoulders. Her Lena is smart but flawed, prone to making impulsive yet understandably desperate choices, yet guarded and scrappy. It’s also a physically demanding role; Lena explores and thrashes about every inch of the limited cabin space out of anger, fear, and sweat-inducing pain. That lively performance helps retain visual interest in a fairly dialogue-heavy film reliant upon the back-and-forth between Lena and Clive, whose actions seem at odds with his warm demeanor.
Terry’s gentle southern drawl and genuine-sounding concern for Lena’s medical predicament instill doubt; who is the reliable narrator here? Bodell uses this dangling question to toy with horror conventions. What begins as a harrowing thriller slowly takes a welcome detour into one of horror’s more underserved corners, and Bodell finds innovative ways to tackle it through more meager budget constraints. While that makes for a far less flashy entry in this particular subgenre than expected, Hellcat thrills for its unconventional approach all the same.
Horror fans will connect the clues and figure out what horror we’re dealing with long before Lena does, but Bodell’s tightly edited feature doesn’t make it easy to predict how it’ll play out once the cards are fully laid on the table.
It’s not just the true horror threat that surprises in Bodell’s debut, but the tender and affecting emotional arcs for its characters. The chamber piece structure and immediacy of its plot mean that time doesn’t always feel as urgent as Clive insists, but the intimacy of the setting is rewarded in the third act, with a reckoning of both Clive’s and Lena’s choices and the love driving them.
Hellcat is a bit of a Trojan horror that defies easy classification, by design. Bodell’s sneaky debut feature is occasionally too sparse in its worldbuilding in its bid to preserve the mystery, but not enough to detract from the thrilling road thriller that transforms into a completely left-field type of horror we don’t get nearly enough of. The stripped-down tribute to a classic horror staple catches you off guard in more ways than one, marking Bodell as one to watch.
Hellcat made its North American premiere at Fantasia. Release info TBD.
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