Synopsis: After becoming lost in the Louisiana swamplands, a group of holidaymakers must fight for their lives against a rampaging hippo on the loose.
Stars: Madison Davenport, Tracey Bonner, Joaquim de Almeida, Michel Curiel, Samantha Coughlan, Olivia Bernstone, Jim Meskimen, River Codack
Director: James Nunn
Rated: NR
Running Length: 93 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: A killer-hippo movie has no right to be this restrained or this fun. Hungry plays the Jaws hand and mostly nails it.
A Hippo Walks Into a Bayou
Hold your Hungry Hungry Hippos jokes, because somebody is surely already writing that one. Until then, the killer-hippo picture Hungry is a genuine gift to those of us starved for a decent creature feature. Director James Nunn drops a game cast into the Louisiana swamp, gets them thoroughly lost, and introduces a predator that has no business being there in the first place.Â
The setup is lean and moves fast. Sistine (Madison Davenport, Sharp Objects) heads to New Orleans to drown the news of a layoff, and her friend Hannah (Olivia Bernstone, Mood) books a swamp tour to salvage the trip. They pile onto a boat with widower Tim (Jim Meskimen, Apollo 13), his nurse daughter Sally (Samantha Coughlan, Arcadian), grandson Mikey (River Codack, Heretic), and overdressed businesswoman Dionne (Tracey Bonner, Sweet Magnolias). Their guide steers them off the usual route chasing a tagged gator named Big Ben. What they find instead is Big Ben torn in half, a capsized boat, and something enormous moving under the surface.
The Cast Knows Exactly What Movie This Is
Here’s the thing about a hippo movie. The producers could have cast it fast and cheap with people happy to phone it in. They didn’t. Everybody here understands the assignment and plays it straight enough that you genuinely root for them to make it out. Nobody is collecting an Oscar for a film about a territorial hippo, but that level of commitment is exactly what makes the fear stick.
Davenport carries the whole thing with conviction, working through panic and desperation at a believable simmer, even making us believe people are still named “Sistine”. Bonner is perfectly cast as the executive who clearly does not belong on a swamp tour, at least until her backstory fills in and complicates her. Every survival story needs someone to test your patience, and Bonner takes that job and runs.
Joaquim de Almeida (Fast X), who has been doing this kind of low-key character acting for decades, looks like he’s having a ball as the seasoned local trying to apply his usual hunting instincts to a predator that is anything but usual. People make dumb decisions, sure, but never the cheap, screenplay-grasping kind. Somebody makes a bad call, and nature does the rest. That’s just the swamp.
The smaller turns hold up too. Meskimen’s Tim is a widowed ex-fireman who keeps his cool while everyone else loses theirs, and there’s a decent amount of satisfaction in watching the senior member of the group turn out to be the most useful. Coughlan gets the film’s best gross-out moment as a nurse forced to cauterize a wound in the worst possible conditions, and she sells the panic and the focus at once. None of these people are written as geniuses, which is the point. They’re tourists, and the swamp does not grade on a curve.
What Hungry Respects Most
Nunn takes the Spielberg route, and that choice is the whole game. He holds the hippo back for a long stretch, doling out hints instead of the full reveal, so the early encounters hit harder because you have no real sense of how big this thing is. It’s the JAWS lesson too many modern monster movies forget: what you don’t see does the heavy lifting. By the time the showy finale arrives and runs long, you’ve earned the payoff and so has the film.
Give the crew their due. Austin Wintory’s score keeps the tension wound tight, Job Reineke’s camera makes the bayou look gorgeous and wrong at the same time, and the team blends practical effects with CGI without ever tipping into rubber-toy territory. The contrast with Chum, the shark movie limping into theaters the same week, is night and day. Nunn never seems to be cutting corners or apologizing for his budget. He set out to make an old-school creature feature, and he made one. And it’s good.
Worth the Swim
There’s even a small idea paddling beneath the surface in Hungry. The hippo isn’t hungry, despite the title. It’s defending its turf, killing trespassers who wandered somewhere they had no right to be. Sometimes the wild simply does not care about us, and pretending otherwise is how people end up as lunch. That’s a surprising amount of meaning to pull from a B-movie about a killer river horse, and I love that it bothered to put it there at all.
It also arrives at the right moment. We’re starved for movies that are simply an experience, the kind you can sum up in a single image and still feel in your gut, and a giant predator in dark water taps a fear that never goes out of style. Hungry won’t change your life, but it respects your imagination, and that alone puts it ahead of most of the pack. In a genre drowning in junk, I count that as a real win.
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