Movie Review--Hostile

"You told me you don't believe in God, but do you believe in fate?"

--Jack, Hostile

Hostile is all the better for allowing its character drama to overshadow even its most spectacular science fiction horror elements.  Some of the most artistically powerful scenes have nothing to do with the roaming reapers of its post-apocalyptic wasteland.  As superbly shot and executed as the scenes with creatures are, it is the kindness shown to a drug addict in the pre-apocalypse world and the personal drama that stands out as the strongest pillar.  Though there are unfortunate highly irrationalistic elements in the core relationship of the movie, here is a romantic partnership that is in no way undeveloped or generally shallow, though it is only shown in a handful of scenes.  Indeed, for the most part, it is one of the very best cinematic relationships a person could find thanks to its sincerity, optimism, and eventual tragedy, all in a new director's debut movie.  In an apocalyptic film that so expertly handles its creature and present day struggle for survival, such excellent flashback sequences have to be very strong to meet or exceed the former.  Hostile accomplishes something truly noteworthy.

Production Values

The camera moves around the outside of an RV as Juliette fights and eventually kills the creature within, instead of showing rapid cuts of the struggle occurring on the inside.  When the reaper, a humanoid creature, appears at Juliette's upside down vehicle at night, only its emaciated-looking, prolonged legs and arms are seen, with its torso and head situated above the camera's cutoff point.  Later, the being is shown more directly, but in the faint lighting of a glow stick at night.  Not only is the creature design phenomenal in itself, but the cinematography rises to meet that same quality.  It only helps that Hostile is not coasting from jumpscare to jumpscare.  Even when the reaper is shown, it is subtlety and directness without cheap jolts that dominate the screen.  Lead actress Brittany Ashworth still manages to give a performance worthy of such a story along with Gregory Fitoussi.  The two of them, although it is Ashworth who has the most scenes, have such a personal chemistry as Juliette and Jack that the entire movie could have been about their pre-apocalypse love story and it would have been no less a masterpiece.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Juliette traverses a desert landscape in the aftermath of a seeming apocalypse that has left cars and boats stranded in the sands.  She enters a building to search for resources, but a creature above the ceiling begins to snarl at her, and during the trip back to her small community, her vehicle overturns, leaving her unconscious until night has fallen.  Her leg broken and her gun thrown outside the flipped car, she prepares to withstand the reapers, hostile animals of the post-apocalyptic landscape.  Her mind revisits memories of her relationship with a man named Jack before the world went to hell, detailing how she met him, how they became romantically entangled, how they had and lost a child, and what happened to them the night that a chemical attack implicitly created the reapers.

Intellectual Content

Even when it only shows people hinting at their worldviews (which are themselves quite irrationalistic in one way or another) or engaging in acts of love for each other, there is sincerity and psychological depth in Hostile, which spills over into a very realistic sort of brokenness in Juliette.  A drug addict, she randomly meets a man named Jack who shows great interest in her as a person, insisting that God or fate brought them together.  This much is only really addressed in two scenes, one closer to the beginning and one closer to the end.  "I have my reasons," he says of his vaguely described theism, to which she replies "I have mine" about her atheism or agnosticism.  While they do not share the same professed philosophical stances and are thus fools for romantically committing to each other, their affection is at least sincere.  Hostile does an unusually good job of portraying how romantic partnerships can be so very deep in one sense while being pointless, superficial, and unworthy in another more foundational sense.  There are other factors that complicate the relationship: Jack does allow Juliette into his apartment and then lock her inside against her will in order to give her the chance to resist obtaining more drugs, an act of borderline kidnapping although he never abducted her to bring her there, but he otherwise shows her a level of kindness that is almost unheard of in most relationships.  Here is someone who uses his inherited wealth, love of art, and patience to genuinely help a fellow person in whom romantic interest blossoms, and the most thematically powerful scenes are those pertaining to Juliette's status and changes as a character when she meets a genuinely kind, selfless person--though someone who is kind for the happenstance, fallacious reasons that non-rationalists live by.

Conclusion

I have only seen Meander and Hostile out of all the films of Mathieu Turi, but he is plainly trying to explore grand ideas and very human characters across his filmography, which is far more than is true of many filmmakers, including some with far more cultural visibility, popularity, and financial success.  In Hostile, like in Meander, the story dwells on the broken lead character as she has to cope with the trials of a science fiction setting.  Turi's lead characters are so realistic in their pain and so layered in their performances that they do not even need to verbalize a great many things in order to be highly fleshed-out, as what they do say, what they do, and even their expressions say enough to catapult them ahead of the more common leads found in movies.  May he get chance after chance to continue creating art!

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Blood is shown launching into windows, and a bone is seen protruding from a broken leg.  A person's skull is crushed by the foot of a reaper.

 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck," "shit," "bastard," and "bitch" are used.