HOSTILE (2017)

Studio:       Sony Pictures Home Ent.
Director:    Mathieu Turi
Writer:       Mathieu Turi
Producer:  Hicham Hajji, Hamid Herraf, Olivier Chateau, Eric Gendarme, Thomas Lubeau
Stars:     Brittany Ashworth, Gregory Fitoussi, Javier Botet, Jay Benedict, David Gasman, Laura D’Arista Adam, Carl Garrison, Mohamed Aroussi, Richard Meiman

Review Score:

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Summary:

A woman stranded in a post-apocalyptic desert reflects on her lost love while struggling to survive against a mutant creature.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While scavenging a post-apocalyptic desert for supplies, Juliet encounters a wounded man who tells her he trapped a murderous mutant known as a “reaper” inside his RV. Juliet fights and kills the reaper before returning outside to discover that the wounded man bled to death.

On Juliet’s drive back to the camp where she lives with fellow survivors, a photo of Juliet with her lost love Jack flutters out the window. Juliet instinctively reaches for the photo, causing her vehicle to swerve and violently overturn.

A flashback shows how Juliet first met Jack at his New York City art gallery. In the present, Juliet regains consciousness to find herself trapped in the vehicle wreckage with a broken leg.

Flashback: Jack walks Juliet to his apartment. Although their subsequent conversation lasts a long time, Juliet becomes overwhelmed by the impressive environment and leaves abruptly.

Juliet painfully resets her broken leg.

Flashback: Jack spots Juliet with another man in an elegant restaurant. Jack follows Juliet outside where he learns that Juliet deals drugs and the other man is a client. Juliet allows Jack to come up to her apartment, but she angrily kicks him out after purposefully revealing she is also a heroin addict.

Juliet tries radioing Harry at the survivor camp for help. When a reaper starts stalking around the vehicle, Juliet throws the radio outside to draw the creature away.

Flashback: Juliet shows up at Jack’s apartment beaten and bloody. Jack cleans her up. Even though she violently resists the following morning, Jack forces Juliet to stay with him until she can get herself clean.

Juliet has another reaper encounter, but fires a shot that compels the creature to slink away. Juliet recovers the radio and begins repairing it.

Flashback: Jack and Juliet move into a new home together as their romance flourishes. On Jack’s suggestion, the couple discusses starting a family.

With the radio repaired, Juliet reconnects with Harry at the camp. Harry instructs Juliet to activate her locater beacon.

Flashback: Juliet happily tells Jack she is pregnant.

Juliet activates the beacon. She also fortifies the vehicle’s windows as she defends herself against another reaper attack.

Flashback: Juliet gives birth in a hospital. However, the baby is stillborn. Jack and Juliet mourn their child’s death.

Harry radios to tell Juliet that rescuers located her signal. However, Harry explains that it is too dangerous to search at night, leaving Juliet to fend for herself until sunrise.

Flashback: Jack and Juliet blame each other for their baby’s death during an argument. Jack ends their relationship.

A crew of cannibals comes for Juliet. The reaper kills the man who grabs at Juliet, causing the other cannibals to flee.

Flashback: News breaks of a chemical attack on New York while Juliet drinks in Carl’s bar. Juliet receives a phone call informing her that Jack was at ground zero.

Losing hope, Juliet considers shooting herself with her handgun.

Flashback: Juliet visits Jack, who barely survived the attack, in quarantine. Juliet apologizes for their broken relationship. Jack uses a wipe board to tell Juliet he loves her and asks her to promise never to give up.

Juliet lowers her weapon. Her resilience renewed, Juliet goes on the offensive against the reaper, injuring it with a gasoline explosion before downing the creature with another gunshot. Juliet falls to the ground too.

Flashback: Juliet finds Jack’s hospital bed empty. Juliet tearfully grieves over Jack’s presumed death.

The dying reaper crawls onto Juliet. Juliet tries reloading her weapon, but fumbles with the bullets. The reaper makes a specific gesture revealing he is actually Jack.

Flashback: During their first meeting, Jack spontaneously closes his gallery and dismisses patrons in order to walk Juliet home.

Juliet and Jack embrace as the sun rises. Juliet tells Jack she loves him as she puts her head against his. Juliet raises her reloaded gun to Jack’s temple and fires a single bullet that presumably kills them both.

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Review:

Dramatic thriller “Hostile” unfolds over parallel plotlines.  One takes place in the past.  The other takes place in the present, which doubles as a post-apocalyptic near future.

Scavenging a desert ghost town for supplies, Juliet comes across a wounded man.  The man warns that he trapped a “reaper,” a feral form of mutant making wasteland living even more dangerous, inside a broken down RV.  Juliet does what remaining survivors always do in such a situation.  She braces for a fierce fight and goes to gun down the creature.

On her drive back to camp, Juliet’s keepsake photograph of her lost love Jack unexpectedly flutters out the window.  Juliet instinctively grabs at the paper picture, inadvertently swerving off an embankment and causing her vehicle to overturn.

While unconscious, Juliet recalls the first time she met Jack, beginning a Memory Lane journey through the highlights and lowlights of their rocky yet romantic relationship.  When Juliet regains her senses, she finds herself trapped inside the wreckage with a broken leg.  Worse, another reaper lurks outside with no apparent intention of leaving.  Stranded and alone, Juliet must mentally revisit her past to summon the resilience now needed to outthink the monster and save her own life.

It’s easy to pick pieces out of the preceding description, e.g. post-apocalyptic wasteland, mutant creature, woman stranded alone, and guess that many of the tricks up the sleeve of this story are old hat.  You wouldn’t be wrong.  “Hostile” has its work cut out for it when it comes to winning favor from fed up filmgoers burned out on similar settings and setups.

Bouncing from a compact isolation chiller with a Mad Max backdrop to a grounded soap opera suitable for basic cable also presents a pacing challenge “Hostile” doesn’t always balance.  Given their dramatically disparate tones, viewers may connect with one of the film’s concurrent halves while the other has a harder time arresting attention.

Part of that issue involves initially icy onscreen chemistry between main actors Brittany Ashworth and Gregory Fitoussi.  The limited heat in Juliet and Jack’s romance rarely rises above room temperature.  Tempo-stalling flashbacks focusing on the couple’s courtship are often dull.  In particular, their meet-cute reads as forcefully aggressive.  And Juliet’s problematic portrayal as an alienating junkie makes Jack’s ongoing fascination with her strangely unmotivated to say the least.

To clarify, Ashworth and Fitoussi, the latter of whom echoes a Michiel Huisman appeal, embody believability through their individual performances.  It’s their time together that could use more sizzle to sell us on sympathizing.

“Hostile” understandably has only so many minutes to recap the entirety of Jack and Juliet’s arc.  Yet the moments the script chooses for development frame their characters curiously, which doesn’t make them entirely endearing to an audience.

Even though “Hostile” hits bumps impeding immersion in its fiction, inventive craftsmanship enables it to be more easily appreciated as a movie.  Writer/director Mathieu Turi works overtime to make a slim concept as cinematic as creatively possible considering all of the restrictive logistics working against the production.

Turi repeatedly comes up with clever camera movements to work around limitations.  The first shot features the photo of Jack and Juliet sitting on Juliet’s dashboard.  We hear Juliet frantically panting following a gunshot as the vehicle goes into motion, but we only see sunlight passing over the picture, distinctly directing our focus onto the most important aspect of this sequence.

Action in Juliet’s first fight with a reaper similarly remains unseen.   The camera instead circles around the RV while bullet flashes light windows and broken blinds bust out glass.  Evidenced again when only the reaper’s legs are visible as it stalks around Juliet’s overturned vehicle, “Hostile” takes attention away from its low budget by turning cost-cutting measures into innovative opportunities for storytelling.

The desert where “Hostile” filmed clearly isn’t conveniently located near an immediately accessible highway either.  Cast and crew got down and dirty somewhere remote, with dirt-caked vehicles furthering the lived-in look adding remarkable visual value to a relatively sparse film.  An inspired indie effort unmistakably stays on display here.

This effort goes an incredibly long way toward energizing areas where engagement starts waning.  Editing quickens the rhythm of two slowed storylines by cutting each to complement fluctuations in the other’s speed.  The camera’s constant fluidity additionally enriches momentum.

Sure, the conclusion may be predictably foreshadowed, but it’s still fittingly sincere to the atmosphere established.  The creepy creature also morphs into a complete character that stands out as one of the most notable physical performances of Javier Botet’s genre career.  Warts and all, when “Hostile” is examined as this whole picture from a distanced perspective, one can see how familiarity gets freshened by the captivating qualities of a passionate presentation.

Review Score:  75

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