Hellcat

Bluesky

What would you think if you woke up in the back of a moving RV with a nasty wound on your arm and no memory of how you got there? Say you were an attractive young woman, your last memory was of being at a nightclub, and the voice coming over the vehicle’s intercom system was that of an older man? This is all the solid information that we get at the start of Brock Bodell’s nerve-shredding Hellcat, and it will be quite a while before we learn more. In the meantime, as Lena (Dakota Gorman) frantically searches for clues, we get to listen to the two of them talking, and consider where we want to put our trust.

There have been a few films built on this sort of model recently. One might think of You’ll Never Find Me, Strange Darling or Charlotte, but suffice to say that Hellcat is going somewhere very different. The man (Todd Terry), who introduces himself as Clive, tells Lena that she’s been infected by a dangerous disease and that he has to get her to hospital before she runs out of time. Just a little provocation leads to him getting highly emotional – off-balance, one might say. Of course, Lena is also pretty emotional, and he hints that this might be due to fever, but it would make sense anyway, wouldn’t it? He seems increasingly stressed and uncertain. She is furious, not letting up. She pries the back door open a fraction and screams for all she’s worth, but a storm swallows the sound.

One of the standouts of Fantasia 2025, Hellcat is an unforgettable ride. It’s driven by those two performances – forceful as she is, Gorman has been getting the most attention, but what Terry does is no small achievement. Still more impressive, however, is the script, which neatly swerves just as it approaches what might seem like an unavoidable fork in the road, going somewhere altogether different. What happens next really shows the actors’ range, utilising a very different kind of emotional power and challenging viewers in a different way.

In the meantime, there is a wealth of detail to explore. Being stuck in an RV for an hour might not sound like the most exciting cinematic experience, but Bodell takes it as a challenge. There’s a dullness to the set that makes the situation more frightening by contrast. Here are the faded colours and worn textures of mediocre family holidays. A bead curtain halfway along partially obscures our vision and is used to great effect. There’s a taxidermied wolf’s head mounted on one fall, so that the voice on the speaker seems to issue from it. A lost hair tie on the floor has a long fair hair attached to it; Lena’s is dark. Occasionally, Lena gets flashbacks, little glimpses of the night before – but the more she learns, the less sense she can make of it. Then she hears something that shocks her, and the probabilities shift again.

Like all the best two-handers, this is really about the interaction of two personalities, weighing in all the things that they don’t know about each other and the assumptions they make. It goes much deeper than the premise might suggest. Aspects of the subject matter mean this probably won’t get the respect it deserves, but it’s really a bravura piece of filmmaking, and it will leave you in a very different place from where you started.

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