Prey(Netflix)
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg
Rating: **
I am flabbergasted,nay, stupefied by the success of Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey , now streaming on Netflix. It is the kind of hunter-hunted cheap-thrills act which we saw in the ‘B’ grade jungle films of yore from Bollywood like Tarzan Goes To Delhi.
Mysterious beasts attacking the good eco-friendly tribes leading their blissful unspoilt lives in herbal harmony, are as outdated as corsets and leaf-smeared wounds. To me the director’s intentions seem more predatory than anything that the mysterious beast unleashes on those poor bow-and-arrow armed tribals in their dainty loin clothes.
The men all have bootpolish smeared on their cheeks probably to hide their untreated pimples.
There are only two women in the entire foliage planet: the film’s protagonist Naru played rather tamely by Amber Midthunder and her mother Michelle Thrush who keeps grinding herbs and wild fruits while the men and her sassy daughter go on their hunt.
But the wild boar is a lame bore.The hunt is the core of this predatory drama. Set in 1719 in the American heartland the film’s cinematographer Jeff Cutter captures some exciting landscape suggesting some distant bleak terror. But the initial sense of foreboding gives way to a much too predictable line of execution, bombarded by grisly visuals of disembodied animals and ripped limbs which the camera seems to love as much as the earlier serene visuals of the unspoilt hinterland.
What is the reason for the success of a film like Prey which is neither cautionary(unless you don’t know that the jungle is filled with wild animals) nor tense enough to qualify as thrilling survival drama? Most of the time the film’s young leading lady romps around the jungle looking like a model for an exotic brand of skin treatment.
The actor who plays her brother Taabe(Dakota Beavers) has a relatively more convincing look to pulsate with the prickly periodicity that the film so proudly projects. But overall, nothing in the set-up ,least of all the body language of the actors, suggests that this film is set in the Wild Wild West of early 18th century when there were no cowboys on horses: only cows and horses. And maybe some dangerous snakes.
The wide popularity of Prey is baffling, to say the least. The film is neither epic in vision nor does director Dan Trachtenberg and his writer Patric Aison pull us into the gruesome adventure in the way some of the other films in the series did.
This is the fifth film in the series and I pray that Prey ends right here. Sometimes success is not,and should not, be the criteria for renewability.Prey is nothing more than jungle-porn with the marauding beast gaining shapes like a Disney product gone rogue.