A Reverse Movie Review
The Catharsis of Crystal May Creasey
by Anthony Servante
The Hunt (2020)
Starring Betty Gilpin
The Hunt (2020), starring Betty Gilpin and Hilary Swank concerns a group of conservative social influencers being hunted by a group of liberal executives. That's the movie you see, but the real movie revolves around Crystal May Creasey. I want to tell her story, which has nothing to do with the two groups of political combatants.
Crystal May Creasey served in the U.S. Army. When she returned to civilian life, she had trouble finding employment and had to settle for a job at Ranger Car Rental place where she is belittled by customers. She puts up with the bad treatment and bottles in her anger, disappointment, and retaliation in order to keep her job. Then she gets kidnapped.
Crystal May being flipped off by customer at car rental.
In a case of mistaken identity Crystal May is mixed up with Crystal Mae (with an "e"), a political podcaster known as "Justice For Y'all". Crystal May wakes up with several others by a cache of weapons and is hunted down. She doesn't know what is going on; however, it doesn't matter. Her survival military instincts kick in. She understands that her life is on the line, so she kills indiscriminately, bolstered by that suppressed anger, disappointment, and retaliation and sharpened into a weapon of rage against that same humanity that has filled her with rage.
After she kills the remainder of the hunters in their bunker, she has a moment with the group's combat trainer to ascertain the whereabouts of the leader of the group, Athena, played by Hillary Swank. During her questioning, the trainer asks Crystal why she doesn't just leave since she killed nearly the whole group of hunters. Crystal almost breaks her composure when she tries to explain her reason, grimacing and pointing her finger as if mimicking a customer at the Ranger Rental, and in the moment when she almost tears up, she instead gathers herself and proceeds to torture the trainer by sticking her finger in his bullet wound until he tells her Athena's whereabouts.
Crystal cannot leave and return to her previous life without first reaching full catharsis by killing the last of the hunting group, its leader. It's not about politics, revenge, or satisfaction. She has nothing to do with these groups killing each other. For her, it's about returning to the combat field where everything made sense, where survival mattered most, where you kill the people trying to kill you. In the rental agency, she couldn't kill the customers. But here where she is being hunted, she can kill the hunters.
Crystal versus Athena
In the end, Crystal May Creasey kills Athena, eats her lunch (in a symbolic gesture of victory), and boards Athena's private jet to fly home. She tells the pilot and stewardess, who are surprised to see that she survived, that she killed all the people trying to kill her and if they have a problem with that. They assure her that there's no problem. They head back to the United States.
We never learn if Crystal May returns to the rental agency job or if she is happy with her reckoning. The movie does not give us enough information to determine the future of our heroine, but if you follow the story of Crystal, there's a lot more to the movie than the politics of the other characters. That's just background fodder. For this film, Crystal May Creasey's catharsis is all that matters.
