Synopsis: Every year, the Florida government invites the general public to compete in an invasive python removal contest in the Everglades. For ten nights, an eclectic group of hunters confront the dangerous terrain, nocturnal creatures and their own desires.
Stars: Toby Benoit, Anne Stratton Hilts, Jimbo McCartney, Shannon McCartney, Richard Perenyi, Joe Wasilewski, Madison Oliveira
Director: Xander Robin
Rated: NR
Running Length: 91 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Twenty-five dollars, a flashlight, and a swamp full of characters who’d make a novelist blush. The Python Hunt turns an unwinnable war on invasive snakes into one of the year’s funniest, tensest documentaries.
The Python Hunt Review: How Florida Got Its Monster
The history of the Burmese python in South Florida reads like the cold open of a creature feature. The snakes arrived the boring way, through the exotic pet trade of the 1970s, bought by people who wanted something impressive in a tank and then learned that impressive grows to eighteen feet. A few got turned loose in the sawgrass. Then, in August of 1992, Hurricane Andrew came ashore as a Category 5 and flattened a breeding facility on the edge of the Everglades, and every snake inside went out into a swamp with no natural predator, no winter to thin the herd, and a buffet of native mammals that had never in their evolutionary history met a constrictor.
They thrived, and the numbers are grim. Road surveys taken before the population exploded and again a decade later found sightings of raccoons, opossums, and bobcats down between 88 and 100 percent in the areas the pythons had reached. When scientists reintroduced marsh rabbits to Everglades National Park, the snakes wiped out the entire population in under eleven months. Nobody can tell you how many are out there now; the estimates run from 30,000 to 300,000, which is science’s polite way of admitting it lost count.
Twenty-Five Dollars and a Flashlight
Florida’s answer costs twenty-five dollars. Pay the fee, pass a fifteen-minute online course, bring a flashlight, and you’re cleared to hunt an apex predator. That’s the Florida Python Challenge, a ten-night contest with cash prizes and a leaderboard, and it’s the setting for Xander Robin’s documentary The Python Hunt. Robin, whose debut feature Are We Not Cats played Venice Critics’ Week, paid the fee himself one summer before he ever brought a camera. He spent ten nights in the Everglades and never saw a single snake.
The contest’s own history tells you what kind of war this is. It launched in 2013 as a month-long event, and nearly 1,600 hunters pulled 68 snakes out of a swamp holding tens of thousands. It ran again in 2016, went dormant, then came back in 2020 as the annual ten-day sprint it is now. The 2024 edition removed 195 pythons, and a 2023 USGS study had already concluded that full eradication is impossible. So the state keeps sponsoring a contest it knows can’t win, because the real product was never removal. It’s awareness. Robin treats that arithmetic as a joke and a tragedy at the same time, then steps back and lets the people he found argue about everything else.
A Cast Nobody Could Have Written
The subjects here are so colorful you’d swear they came out of a Crayola box, and all roads lead to Anne Stratton Hilts. She’s a lifelong birder from North Carolina who spent decades on safari with her third husband, and she now lives in a Vero Beach retirement community with a new boyfriend and one item left on the bucket list. So she hires Cajun outdoorsman Toby Benoit to take her into the swamp and keep taking her until she gets her snake.
Benoit is an eighth-generation Floridian, a bestselling novelist, and a guide with 35 years in the field, and following Hilts’ mounting frustration at not finding a snake is both a delight and a small warning. Bloodlust doesn’t wait its turn politely, and Hilts is the funniest and most alarming proof of that I’ve seen all year. If anybody ever fictionalizes this, and I hope they do, only someone like Lois Smith could do Hilts justice.
The rest of the roster covers the full spectrum. Jimbo McCartney traded nightclub management in New Jersey and Fort Lauderdale for the Everglades, where he raised his daughter Shannon as ’Glades Girl. Richard Perenyi is an elementary school science teacher and lifelong herper who arrives looking like the most serious man in the swamp, all mission and method, and then gets gently sidelined by his own adventures micro-dosing ecstasy mid-hunt.
Madison Oliveira is a nuisance wildlife trapper and a former Marine. Biologist Joe Wasilewski has been explaining reptiles on television since the Carson era. Benoit and a couple of the other veteran hunters can spot a python in a bush while driving past it at 45 miles an hour, a skill I’d have called impossible before watching them do it twice.
That looseness cuts both ways. The construction is haphazard, strong on the mechanics of the contest and thin on the people in it, and most of them end up revealing themselves through raw footage rather than any structured portrait. What saves it is Robin’s posture. He never once invites you to laugh at these folks, and that restraint is exactly why the film plays as true. Snake people, like horse people, are unapologetically odd, and nothing here feels staged or arranged for the camera.
Night Vision
For a documentary shot almost entirely after dark, this is unusually easy to follow. Cinematographers David Bolen and Matt Clegg keep converting swamp into suspense, and the question is always the same: where’s the snake, up in that tree or already around somebody’s ankle? One hunter ends up with a python wrapped around his arm, fangs in, circulation cut off, and he drives back toward town making a remarkably casual phone call while the animal keeps tightening.
Editor Max Allman, coming off Ren Faire, cuts that sequence like a horror picture and knows precisely how long to hold. Nick León’s score, his first for a film, arrives on the heels of an album Pitchfork named Best New Music, and it slinks along under everything. The craft is the happy surprise here.
The Politics of the Pithing Rod
Nobody in the film says the word politics out loud, but you can feel it riding shotgun on every night drive. This is Florida, a state that votes red and has spent decades absorbing families who fled oppressive governments on nearby islands, and here’s a state-sponsored contest inviting the whole world to round up the invaders that slipped into its jewel of a wilderness and drive a metal rod through their heads. Everyone on camera insists it isn’t political. Spend enough nights in the truck beds and you stop quite believing them.
Robin stays scrupulously objective through all of it, which is the noble choice and the harder one, because the camera keeps catching a distinction a lesser film would blur: some of these hunters are here for the joy of the hunt, and a few are plainly here for the pleasure of the kill. The pythons are staying, the challenge is staying, and that contradiction is the best thing in the movie. To Robin’s credit, he leaves it coiled rather than resolved.
A hundred people wade into the dark every night to fight a war the state already knows it lost. The miracle of The Python Hunt is that it makes you understand why they keep showing up.
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