Brock Bodell’s tight, claustrophobic survival thriller questions who’s really protecting whom under the watchful eye of the full moon.
★★★
Lena (Dakota Gorman) awakens inside a ramshackle camper hurtling down the highway, a raw wound on her arm and no memory of how she got there. Clive (Todd Terry), the truck driver, speaks to her only through an intercom embedded in a taxidermy wolf’s head. He claims she’s bitten and infected, insists he’s bringing her to a specialist doctor, and all the while keeps the trailer locked. Clearly something doesn’t add up, and it seems she has no choice: escape or die.
The film rarely leaves its single space, but every inch of that trailer feels alive. The camera is frequently handheld, the set feels lived-in, the clatter of the road relentless. Bodell extends every creak and flicker into physical suspense as the trailer starts to give up its secrets. Lena’s frantic breaths, the juddering floor, and the shifting lights all merge to produce a sense of a journey not towards salvation but into threat. As memories and hallucinations materialise around her, the trailer becomes her own personal universe of trauma.
Gorman owns the screen, with her breathe-through-gritted-teeth desperation wonderfully gripping. Clive remains off-screen far longer than expected; when Todd Terry finally appears, his warmth unsettles more than his silence ever could. Their emotional stakes align, as both are haunted by loss, and as the narrative evolves, survival becomes a two-way street.
Bodell is the film’s writer, director, producer and editor. Their smart, stripped back approach and focus on providing a strong emotional core are reminiscent of Larry Fessenden’s work, putting grounded modern spins on classic genre tropes. Horror fans will find much to enjoy. Not everything lands cleanly: some dialogue feels rough and a late third act shift feels a little schematic. Yet Bodell’s restraint brings honesty to the pacing, and Hellcat shows how little it takes to make fear fill the space between four rattling walls.
Hellcat played at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
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