Apple TV’s French drama “The Hunt” made headlines when it was pulled from the streamer’s schedule just days ahead of its initially scheduled December premiere due to plagiarism allegations. The series was accused of copying key elements from the 1973 novel Shoot by the late American author Douglas Fairbairn. Those claims clearly had some significant merit, given that the final product returns to our screens bearing a label on each episode that identifies it not only as adapted from Fairbairn’s book but also credits the subsequent feature film that bears its name. Unfortunately, this sort of lazy catchall vibe persists throughout the bulk of the six-part thriller, which is the worst sort of paint-by-numbers adaptation, so much so that the only remarkable thing about it is that nobody really noticed it was repeating the story beats of someone else’s work until mere days before it was supposed to air.
“The Hunt” is, to put it generously, not very good. Its pacing is painfully slow, its twists ploddingly telegraphed. Its characters are, for the most part, incredibly thinly sketched, with little more than a handful of identifiable traits meant to stand in for entire personalities. And, as an adaptation, it’s deeply uninteresting, shifting the setting of its story to France but not using that change to say anything particularly worthwhile about gun culture, toxic masculinity, or the escalating violence and unrest that’s becoming prevalent in small-town Europe. This is all doubly unfortunate because, on its own, the series’ premise is intriguingly dark and could be played out in any one of a dozen more interesting ways than what we end up getting.
The story begins with a group of friends on the sort of weekend hunting excursion you get the sense they take often. There’s group ringleader Franck (Benoît Magime), who definitely seems to own the most weaponry, as well as his sidekicks: Xavier (Damien Bonnard), Simon (Cédric Appietto), and Gilles (Manuel Guillot). Things suddenly take a dire turn when they’re inexplicably shot at by an unidentified second group of hunters deep within the woods. Simon is injured, and his friends scramble to return fire. One of the other unidentified hunters is hit, and the rest of the series is essentially about dealing with the fallout from this moment, and from Franck’s decision not to tell the police they may have killed a man.
As the group tries to settle back into their lives, they each find themselves growing increasingly paranoid as they’re forced to hide what happened from their families and worry over whether the other group is plotting revenge. Blackmail, raucous town meetings, arson, kidnapping, and even a dash of wild animal decapitation ensue. “The Hunt” does manage to generate some intriguing tension at times, leaning into the dread of its anonymous central threat and the fear that can drive desperate men to make terrible choices. Its gorgeously atmospheric setting feels almost hauntingly oppressive at times, and there are some fascinating threads of class tension simmering beneath the village’s seemingly picturesque streets.
But “The Hunt” struggles to make its central characters particularly interesting, or even fully three-dimensional. For all that Franck is ostensibly the series’s lead, we learn very little about who he is or what he wants. He’s cheating on his wife with another woman, though your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what he sees in her or what’s wrong with his marriage beyond the fact that Krystel (Mélanie Laurent) has a busy career. It’s an almost complete waste of Magimel, an award-winning performer who gets to do very little here besides display varying degrees of rage. And Franck’s core friends fare little better.
Simon, who fired the shot that struck the other hunter, visibly struggles with guilt over what he’s done, but beyond the fact that his ailing (and weed-loving) father lives with him and his wife, you’ll struggle to recall another single fact about him. Gilles is the kindest of the group, and though he seems to have both a drinking problem and an anxiety disorder, he at least means well. And then there’s Xavier, who steals packages from neighbors to sell for cash to a neighborhood meth dealer. None of these people is what you might call particularly likable or even all that sympathetic, and their characters are so flat that it’s difficult to get invested in what happens to them, even when presumably life or death stakes are involved.
Strangely, it’s the secondary plots that are its most compelling. One follows Franck’s wife, Krystel, as she attempts to help a homeless young runaway at a local shelter, who’s looking for a friend who’s gone missing. The other centers on Franck and Krystel’s daughter, Estelle (Sarah Pachoud), as she engages in some teenage rebellion by dating a local bad boy (Paul Beaurepaire) with uncomfortable family ties to some of the village’s more dangerous residents. Laurent exudes an effortless warmth and competence as Krystel, and her quiet determination is all the more affecting when weighed against her husband’s bluster. Pachoud, for her part, takes what ought to be a fairly thankless role and turns it into something much more interesting than it has any right to be. (It also doesn’t hurt that she and Beaurepaire have some excellent star-crossed style chemistry, either.)
To its credit, “The Hunt” does get more interesting once the ways its multiple subplots overlap are revealed, and it does manage to pull off some fairly impressive action sequences, particularly in its back half. And while its ending does provide more context and motivation for everything that’s happened than the original film and book this story is based on, it is also incredibly pat and muddies any sort of larger message the show might have been trying to convey.
It’s unfortunate when a series that sounds as good on paper as “The Hunt” does fails so spectacularly to live up to its own potential. A slog from start to finish and almost completely unwilling to take any sort of risks, it’s a thriller that really wants to be “The Most Dangerous Game,” but ultimately winds up remarkably safe.
All six episodes screened for review. Premieres March 4 on Apple TV.