Hellcat
Writer/Director: Brock Bodell
Cast: Dakota Gorman, Todd Terry, Liz Atwater
It's hard to talk about a movie like Hellcat, simply because the more you peel back its plot, the more its power diminishes — at least on first watch. There is so much to talk about within this film, but it's wrapped in such a potent, high-concept hook that I really want to tell you how great it is while also saying as little as possible about how it becomes great. And I want to tell you that, if and when this film finds distribution, you should seek it out, because it's one of the most potent and gripping things I saw at the Fantasia International Film Festival this year.
The basic hook is this: Lena (Dakota Gorman) wakes up in a strange room, hurt and confused, unaware of where she is or how she got there. But the room seems to be moving at high speed, and it doesn't take long for her to realize that she's been locked into a travel trailer being pulled down the highway by some unseen driver.
As she explores, digging through cupboards and messing with the door, a voice calls out to her from a speaker embedded at the head of the trailer. It's her captor, a mysterious man (Todd Terry) driving up front, who tells her that she's been seriously injured and she has to get to a hospital. She begs to be let go instead, but the man insists that her injuries are unique, and that if she doesn't get the right medical attention, something horrible beyond her imagining will happen to her.
This is exactly what the film promises and, for at least the first couple of acts, exactly what it delivers. Writer/director Brock Bodell keeps the action tight, focused on Lena's extremely limited view of the world from inside that trailer. The film begins as a taut suspense picture, a simple survival horror scenario in which Lena's sole purpose is to escape.
But what makes Hellcat so compelling in the end is not how well it executes that beginning, but where things go next. Bodell's smart script, embodied by a tour de force performance from Gorman, flows naturally from one obstacle to the next for the protagonist, until at least Lena and her captor, Clive, are left with nothing else but to talk about their shared predicament. It's here that the film's most human layers start to present themselves, as we learn why Clive believes what he believes, what the wider world around him has to do with it, and how Lena fits into that larger scheme.
This is where the horror elements really start to creep in, and I don't just mean the mystery surrounding what's really going on with Lena and her injuries. That's a horror all its own, as is the primal fear of being held captive in a speeding vehicle headed God knows where. But the real dread in Hellcat comes from the why of it all.
What forces would possess a man to abduct a woman and drive her — under lock and key — to another location for her own good? What voice would this young woman have in determining her own fate, if she had any at all? What external voices shaped this scenario and put these two people on this strange collision course? The straightforward metaphor of a woman's choice in the future of her own body is right there, running through the film. Running alongside it are discussions of empathy, radicalization, and dangerous media influence, all of which work quite well within this tense, frantic little story of two people locked together in one screwed-up world.
Hellcat is still on the festival circuit, which means the only way you can see it right now is to head somewhere it's playing. If you have the means, I encourage you to do that as soon as possible, so you can see this intimate, haunting story unfold without too much in the way of spoilers. Otherwise, keep this film on your mind for when it gets a wide release. It's one of the most pleasant genre movie surprises of 2025 for me so far, and it deserves a big audience.
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