Hellcat Movie Review – This Horror Scratches for Attention, But Its Claws Are Blunt

The first two acts of Brock Bodell’s Hellcat evoke strong comparisons to David Yarovesky’s Locked. Lena (Dakota Gorman) finds herself stuck inside a camping trailer with a wound. A voice identifying itself as Clive (Todd Terry) tells Lena that he’s a good man, and he’s taking her to the doctor, because she only has one hour before the infection from her wound spreads to disastrous consequences. From there, the question looms: who can be trusted here?

Bodell lures the viewer in with the hook of intrigue, because you want to know why Lena is in the camping trailer and why Clive locked her in there. Both Dakota Gorman and Todd Terry do their part in selling this. You don’t know if either of them can be trusted; they both display sympathetic qualities, but there’s an underlying darkness in them too. Look, it isn’t too difficult to predict the twist in this tale, judging from the trailers and synopsis alone, and Bodell doesn’t seem too concerned with that, using it merely as a backdrop for his exploration of other themes.

The problem is Bodell infuses far too many topics into the first two acts of Hellcat. Is it about identity? Motherhood? Fatherhood? Marriage? Conspiracy theories? Isolation? The correct answer is all of them. The writer-director flips from Lena to Clive back and forth, which further compounds the confusion and muddies the core message – what the movie is about in one word. This does no favors to Hellcat, as these existential discussions often trail off into endless rambles that actually have you looking at your watch, wondering how long to go until the story goes somewhere. I appreciate that Bodell is a filmmaker with a lot to say about various subjects, but maybe he should have spread these themes out across several films rather than cram them all into one.

Hellcat roars to life in the third act once it leaves behind all the jabbering. There’s still a seed of doubt in the viewer’s mind about what’s taking place here, but the elevated danger takes the story to a whole new level of tension. The film doesn’t use blood or gore to get this point across, relying on the overall uncertainty to crawl under the audience’s skin – and it does so to marvelous effect. All this good is undone by a horrible and predictable ending, though. In fact, I remember saying to myself earlier in the movie, “I hope they don’t go there in the end.” And yip, they go there. It’s impossible to discuss it without spoilers, but it could easily pass as an origin story for a certain Michael J. Fox movie from the ’80s.

Unfortunately, Hellcat complicates life for itself with its filmmaking choices. It had the potential for greatness – all the parts are there in the superb acting, unsettling cinematography, and claustrophobic setting – but in an effort to be too much and do everything in 91 minutes, it does mostly nothing in the end.

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