Hunting Day, by Annick Blanc | Let’s Walk in the Woods

With Hunting daya psychological thriller in which Nahéma Ricci plays a sex worker who joins a pack of hunters led by an alpha male played by Bruno Marcil, Annick Blanc has made a first feature film with panache. The Press met them.

Having convinced the charitable Kevin (Frédéric Millaire Zouvi) to take her back to the hunting camp where she danced at a bachelor party, Nina (Nahéma Ricci) must convince the hunters to put her up for a few days. Bernard (Bruno Marcil), leader of the clan, the eccentric Philippe (Marc Beaupré), the future groom LP (Alexandre Landry) and Claude (Maxime Genois), a colossus who is not very reassuring, will therefore move on to a show of hands. Not without first blindfolding the young woman.

Any woman in this situation would want to run away. But Nina, who has seen it all, seems to be enjoying it. Scenes where the reactions of the female character will disconcert both the spectators and the hunters, Annick Blanc (In the middle of nowhere else, Turn Off Before Living And The color of your lips) has a whole lot in reserve in Hunting day.

“We worked a lot with the actors because often, the characters don’t act like we would act in real life, so I had to explain their internal logic so that the acting was natural. For all these characters to exist, I needed the actors in every scene, so the shooting days were exhausting,” recalls the director, who saw the shooting of her first feature film interrupted by the pandemic, then by a pregnancy.

Just when Nina believes she has earned her place in the pack, Kevin, who is clearly generous, brings back to the hunting camp the enigmatic Doudos (Noubi Ndiaye), an undocumented immigrant who was wandering at the edge of the forest. From then on, the balance of power changes between the men and the woman.

“Nina is a character with an unpredictable nature,” explains the actress revealed in Antigoneby Sophie Deraspe. She has a kind of freedom and carefreeness that I wouldn’t necessarily have shared. She’s also someone who keeps control, an illusion of control through the same tools that marginalize her, that is to say her sexuality. She is not always aware of the precariousness of her status in the group, she navigates between the awareness and the unconsciousness of this precariousness. For me, who has played a lot of roles of introverted adolescents, this role marks a passage to adulthood.

Varied influences

Very early in Hunting daywhile the characters reveal hidden facets of their personality and the relationships between them become more complex, we are forced to recognize the influences of The Luminous Beastby Pierre Perrault, and by Deliveranceby John Boorman.

“ The Luminous Beast – a film that I love, a truly remarkable documentary, one of my favorite films with For the rest of the world –, it’s clearly an initial inspiration, confirms Bruno Marcil. In Perrault’s film, Bernard L’Heureux, it was the inspiration for my character. For us, Quebec men, there is something in there that is very unhealthy, but which is also a little bit at the source of what we are, of the guilt that we carry today. Bernard has this more grounded side and at the same time mansplainer [homme qui a tendance à “pénispliquer”]he is the alpha male who is a bit like the heir to our fathers’ gang.”

Admitting to having been inspired by Perrault and Boorman, Annick Blanc reveals that she also drew her inspiration from the director of White ribbon and of Funny Games : “I tried to add to the film a touch of Michael Haneke, his coldness in human horror, because horror, the real one, is that which is in the choices that we decide to make or not to make.”

If Hunting day is not strictly speaking a horror drama, the fact remains that the film, a psychological thriller with dreamlike and marvelous accents, flirts at times with the codes of slasher sylvan.

“ Hunting day is at the intersection of several genres and this type of film has often been dominated by men, says Nahéma Ricci. What is horror? It’s playing with what’s scary. I find it really interesting to write a thriller where the tension is that of male violence, because these are the fears that run through us as women. The fear of being raped is daily, it’s there all the time, day and night; we’re socialized like that.

Beyond cinematic influences, Hunting daywhich the filmmaker carried within her for ten years, draws its source from a toxic relationship suffered by Annick Blanc, who however preferred to treat it metaphorically.

“At first, it was a closed-door meeting between two people about a toxic relationship,” she explains. “At one point, I couldn’t cope with it and I told myself that I needed to move towards something bigger. I wanted to bring the aspect of a society that blinds itself to what is collapsing around it, which gave me the narrative framework of the thriller, and to hold on to it.”

The toxic man therefore took on five distinct faces: “In the film, these men are not bad. They are complex, nuanced, and that’s what interested me, all the gray areas that were there. They are welcoming, protective, but at the same time, they can eat you up. By joining this gang, you are stuck in something that is bigger than you.”

They may not be evil, but these five hunters will give Nina and Doudos a hard time.

“Even though I knew there was a gaslighting scene, scenes where Nina is ostracized by men, I didn’t realize that the subject of toxic relationships had taken over so much. I realize that if all of this remained at the level of metaphors, it’s because it was so much in me,” concludes Annick Blanc.

In theaters August 16

Psychological thriller

Hunting day

Annick Blanc

With Nahéma Ricci, Bruno Marcil, Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi, Marc Beaupré, Alexandre Landry, Maxime Genois and Noubi Ndiaye

House 4:3
1 h 19