Night Hunter review – sicko serial killer, meet the vigilante castrator
Henry Cavill hunts a split-personality murderer in this throwaway throwback to the days of straight-to-video shlock
These days, most younger readers probably don’t even understand the meaning of “straight to video”. But back in the day, it was a label slapped on films, often genre fare, so unloved by even their rights holders that only contractual obligation ensured they would see the light of day. This crime thriller, with its lurid serial-killer conceit and a cast peppered with talents who must have just needed the money, is a nostalgic throwback to those straight-to-video guilty pleasures of yore.
Henry Cavill glowers manfully throughout as a hardened detective named, with on-the-nose nominative determinism, Marshall, pursuing a sicko in Minnesota who kidnaps and imprisons young women in his dank torture dungeon, damaging their hearing in order to play out his compulsions. The twist is that Marshall and his colleagues, including police commissioner Harper (a slumming Stanley Tucci) and forensic psychologist Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), appear to capture the killer within the first half-hour. He is a weedy gibbering shell of man named Simon (Brendan Fletcher, chewing carpet, linoleum, astrotur) who was himself the victim of terrible childhood trauma. Rachel reckons that Simon has a disassociative personality disorder and if she could get one of his alternate personalities to talk to her they could crack innumerable cold cases.