Hunting Season

The Weight of the Woods

There is an entire little subgenre devoted to men who have withdrawn from civilization and now spend their days chopping wood, glaring at the horizon, and pretending silence counts as healing. I usually keep those movies at arm's length. There are only so many times you can watch a scarred older man insist he's done with violence before the guns inevitably come back out. Raja Collins' *Hunting Season* got past that skepticism on sheer mood. It knows violence is exhausting long before it turns violent itself, and that makes all the difference.



Mel Gibson plays Bowdrie, a survivalist hiding out in the Oklahoma woods while raising his daughter Tag (Sofia Hublitz) off the grid. What's striking about Gibson here is how little spark he tries to summon. He no longer moves like a live wire. He moves like a man whose joints argue with him every morning. Every step feels measured. Every look suggests he is quietly mapping escape routes and threat angles. So when Tag finds a badly beaten woman named January (Shelley Hennig) washed up near the river, Bowdrie's first response isn't noble urgency. It's the awful recognition that trouble has finally found its way to the cabin.



Collins gives the first half room to sit in that dread. The rhythms of Bowdrie and Tag's secluded life matter, and the hush inside the cabin starts to feel almost defensive. One scene stuck with me: Tag cleaning January's wounds while Bowdrie stands in the doorway, half-hidden in shadow. He barely moves. He barely speaks. But the tightening at his jaw says everything. Their isolation is over. Whatever peace he thought he'd built was always temporary. Hublitz, for her part, keeps Tag from turning into a stock endangered teenager. She plays her as observant, capable, and old enough to see the gap between her father's protective rules and the blood now drying on their floor.



Eventually the movie has to cash the check, and it does. Alejandro, the cartel boss played by Jordi Mollà, arrives with a manic, volatile energy that crashes hard against Gibson's locked-down restraint. Some viewers will probably find that contrast too pulpy; Mollà is absolutely chewing scenery. I kind of liked the mismatch. Peter Gray at *The AU Review* was right when he wrote that "the human element elevates *Hunting Season* beyond the simplistic actioner most people will be expecting." It's not flawless, and the final firefight comes off a little rushed. But the thing that lingers isn't the action. It's the look on a man who realizes the past doesn't stay buried just because you dragged yourself far enough into the woods.