Hellcat
An apparent Fantasia darling, Brock Bodell’s debut feature confounds instead.
Claustrophobia can be a wonderful tool in film. When a character is boxed in we can decorate that and show it in so many different ways. Custom framing around what is or becomes important to the moment exhibits artistic flair and clues the audience into a particular psyche or way of thinking in a situation without uttering a word. By boxing yourself in, new worlds open up completely; filmmakers can bend or break rules, disregard order of events, dress and bathe sets in light or decorations that can convey internal battles, rough patches they got through, better days. This isn’t exclusive to claustrophobia in cinema but when there isn’t much externally to focus on the camera can create things for us to see within a set perspective. Hellcat sets out to try this in its first act but ultimately pulls away from this constraint, ripping out and ruining what it set to develop like a sawtooth blade rending a newly explored wound in case there was any hope to cleanly patch it up.
Hellcat has its efforts concentrated from the film's very first moments. A woman visually trapped in small quarters with no information as to how she got there intrigues. No one but a disembodied voice through an intercom talking to her, like a ward suddenly assigned to her charge, deepens and compels further. Her confinement becomes less and less urgent in reading malicious intent as she discovers she has full reign of a living space at her disposal. Small and confining to an extent, that element of concern dissolves so quickly after panic has become the mode of operation. We forget why the photography holds on the open visor of her door, fastened shut, pulling out to show nothing but black around it communicating how small and powerless Lena is at this point.
This inescapable place she wakes up in hosts short stabs of condensed memories: a best friend at a nightclub exclaiming on the state of her appearance, her father sitting at a table with his head in his hands after the passing of her mother, foliage surrounding a mounted wolf's head in the shoddy trailer's bedroom positioned as a suggestion of inception, a man in silhouette aiming a rifle and shouting in her direction. These micro-moments exist almost in a theatrical terrarium, relevant set dressing and foliage embellishing burned-in memories triggered by mere association. She is clearly affected, especially when she inadvertently dials her mother's number over the intercom, waking up her confiscated phone via voice command. Brock Bodell places us in her position and perspective but abandons it for a larger focus that feels more in line to pander to a specific audience than to commit to something far more challenging and compelling.
Propelling the story is information meted out in the man's distant radio-crackled voice, promising the final destination is a medical specialist to see to an apparent infection. As it also opens up dialogue between the two of them, there becomes less a sense of conflict than misplaced concerns predicated on perceived intentions. This leads to a contradictory feeling of compassion and comradery, revealing there to be no real antagonist. Sprinkled throughout the trailer are artifacts from the man's past. As Lena asks after them or brings them up it triggers biographical monologues from him. As the man driving the truck narrates these, the film feels notably defanged -- like a video game where the player is certain that nothing bad can happen in this specific instance. Only at a determined moment in the future does there feel like danger could be introduced.
When narrative perspective shifts it loses large swathes of momentum and feels gutted once what we thought was important becomes waved away as apparent time-stretching filler. Even as Lena lays back on the trailer’s bed listening to the saved voicemail of her late mother, that dialogue there carries some emotional weight despite being somewhat ruined by verbalizing inferred struggles Lena faces. What felt like these attentively built stakes essentially get tossed for something far less meticulous and incongruous in tone without it having anything to offer in any spectrum of storytelling. Clive, the man driving the truck, has now become the most important because of his own portentous quest and must have a shocking revelation reserved for him that overrides that of Lena’s and her urgent bodily threat of infection until it becomes of no import.
What instead takes the focus is Clive’s current obsession with a radio show aimed at crackpots and conspiracy theorists in a journey that shifts more in his own head than ours. The short history he offers Lena is his fascination with the uncanny: UFOs, cryptids, monsters, things read about in a surrogate-Strange Tales periodical that eventually took over his life. But this is all something merely summed up for Lena in a short, one-sided conversation. What was visually enticing before melts into something disappointingly more mundane. Thrown at us are small twists and revelations structured as if in a television miniseries or like t-shirts shot into ravenous crowds from a PVC bazooka tube, something but not nearly enough, designed to bait and divert from that which lies alone and left undeveloped and forgotten. When the subgenre of horror this has always been is revealed in official capacity there is no impact to it. Not because it was carelessly telegraphed but because everything we know about tortured characters in creature features skips vital checkpoints to garner the most basic of sympathies.
For a great deal of the film a lot rests heavily on the performance of Lena, played wonderfully by Dakota Gorman, yet also on the vocal performances of nearly every other character. Once the jump is made from heard and not seen to a mess of both an ineffable mystique evaporates near instantly. The promised conflict of the film devolves into a masculine pissing contest. Bodell places his tortured women behind the driven and determined men who effortlessly wrest any hard-earned agency away for themselves. Lena's "shocking" reveal of her pregnancy early on in the film serves as the script's curveball, threatening a grossly realized deus ex machina in an exercise of misogynistic overkill. On paper this may have the makings of a true festival darling but its guts are pretty damned ugly, and no amount of ephemera pontificated beyond their immediate consumable value can balance that out.
Hellcat premieres on Shudder’s streaming service Friday, August 14th.
[this article was originally published august 13, 2026 on celluloid consommé.]
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