Frank Khalfoun teamed up with Shudder to bring us a thriller horror story about a woman who’s cheating on her husband and has the worst day of her life after walking into a gas station convenience store. That’s the gist of The Night of the Hunted, a bullet-ridden, blood-and-gore horror story whose conclusion leaves us baffled.
Camille Rowe plays Alice, a woman with profound character flaws, we see how a cast made up of Abbe Andersen, Monaia Abdelrahim, Aleksander Popovic, Jeremy Scippio, John Bieler, and Brian Breiter under the directorial lens of Khalfoun manages to bring us a deeply horrific story right in the eve of Halloween.
Still, the film’s conclusion is puzzling and today, with some heavy spoilers for context, I plan on telling you what my interpretation of this film’s conclusion is. So, without any further ado, let’s try to break down what is the fuzz about The Night of the Hunted.
The Night Of The Hunted Plot
Alice is a woman who after some convention is supposed to have an appointment with a fertility doctor. Alice is married to Erik, and they’re seeking a child. But Alice’s character is flawed and full of resentment, and she cheats on Erik with a dude from work named John at a motel.
After having sex and leaving the motel, John and Alice stop at a gas station, while John pumps the gas, Alice goes into the convenience store to get herself a couple of snacks for the road. On her way to the cash register, Alice finds that there’s bloodstains on the counter, she gets scared and tries to leave the inside of the store.
Then, she gets shot in her hand by an unseen shooter with a scoped rifle. In pain, Alice tries calling John, but he doesn’t answer because he’s blasting tunes from his car stereo, so Alice lies against the back of a shelf while on the ground in pain.
While we don’t know it yet, it seems as though the shooter wants Alice dead because he fires several shots her way, missing and making Alice get scared sh*tless. Moreover, Alice tries to use her phone, but the signal is dead AF. Then, she sees a walkie-talkie and tries to use it but she’s unsuccessful.
John
So, at this point, what the hell is John doing besides listening to loud music on his car stereo? He realizes that that gas pump is taking too long, and he recalls that he filled up the car’s tank the day before the motel sex meeting with Alice. So, John finds out that the gas tank has a leak.
John leaves the car, goes inside the convenience store, and gets shot, his body drops and Alice screams in pain and in horror. Alice tries to communicate with the radio, but nope, that ain’t working, the man on the other side of the radio, likely the shooter seems determined to make Alice suffer.
The shooter tells her via radio that John is dead AF, and when Alice begins to beg for her life, the shooter lets out a massive gun barrage that leaves the store looking like a Swiss cheese.
Alice crawls around, duct tapes her hand, and discovers another dead body, which the shooter claims is his wife Amelia.
The gunman goes on to say that he used to love Amelia unconditionally, but that she chose to sleep with another man out of boredom rather than return the favor.
It becomes evident why Alice is the target of the shooter: both of them cheated on Erik, their spouse. Alice tries to stop the oncoming cars by turning on her car’s anti-theft alarm, but she is unsuccessful. Alice is asked to show herself by the gunman, who disables her car and promises to make her death painless.
Doug
Unexpectedly, a dude named Doug enters the shop and starts looking for Amelia. Unfortunately, Doug forgot his phone in his car when Alice asked him to call the police. Alice, on the other hand, starts to suspect that Doug is the shooter and that he has come to this location to find Alice hiding.
In the gas station, Doug makes it clear that he also works the graveyard shift. In order to give Doug time to run to his car and grab his phone and call the police, Alice intends to divert the gunman’s attention. Sadly, the plan backfires, and Doug is killed by the gunman as he tries to take his phone. The gunman then lashes out at Alice, accusing her of being a conceited individual who will sacrifice anyone for herself.
The Night Of The Hunted Ending Explained
Let’s get one thing out of the way, we never know who’s shooting that gun. Now, that shooter tells Alice that he knows everything about her. And as it seems, he did his homework, because he terrorizes Alice on details about her work life.
Alice begs for her life, he tells the shooter to let her go, that she’s trying to get pregnant, and that she’s a victim in her own way to her family and her superiors at work. That she’s having an affair to cope with the pain. When all this happens, Alice gets a bullet in the leg as she tries to get to John’s car.
But things get worse, because everyone trying to help Alice gets a bullet too. There’s this “we live in a society” monologue from the shooter that makes everything boring. Meanwhile, Alice crawls to another car that has a couple that’s dead in the front seat, with a kid named Cindy hiding in the backseat. There’s an exchange proposed, to spare Cindy’s life for Alice’s, and the kid goes to the convenience store.
When the shooter appears, Alice jumps at him, and tries to stab him with a piece of glass, but the gunman overpowers her, shoots her twice, goes towards Cindy, and as Alice’s life leaves her body, she manages to kill the dude by smashing his head. Then, Cindy runs away in fear and the movie ends.
We never know why the killer did what he did except for his monologue, and we don’t know who he is, it’s up for us to leave that idea inside our heads. And that’s fine because sometimes filmmakers like to play with our minds just like that.
