Lena (Dakota Gorman) awakens with no idea about her surroundings. The room is moving and cramped. She feels groggy, as though escaping a drug-fueled sleep. And she has no recollection of what occurred or might have occurred to get her here. So when Clive’s (Todd Terry) voice comes over a loudspeaker lodged within a wolf’s head hanging above the Airstream’s dining-room table, she must assume the worst. He can call himself a “good and honest guy” all he wants, but Lena is locked in an RV with no earthly clue as to what his true intentions are.
That’s when Brock Bodell’s Hellcat presents its central narrative thrust. Clive explains he rescued her from a campsite after she’d been infected by a malicious virus currently moving towards her heart. If Lena doesn’t get special care ASAP, she will succumb to infection. And since they cannot involve anyone else without risking a full-blown outbreak, he begs her to trust him, to believe that he dressed her wounds and padlocked the exterior door for her own protection. After all, she’s not tied-up or gagged. Clive is doing his best to ensure she’s as aware of what’s happening as he can tell her, but the circumstances guarantee it will never be enough.
A survival film then reveals itself. Lena desperately searches the trailer to acquire anything that might facilitate an escape: trying all the doors; screaming into the wind whipping as they barrel down the highway; grabbing a pair of scissors as a weapon; and does all she can to coax Clive to her side. She asks him to call someone from her phone to let them know she’s alive. She tries humanizing herself by talking about her mother’s death and her own impending motherhood. The hope is that he’ll trip up and give her an opening to yell for help or hit a nerve to make him angry enough to stop the vehicle and relinquish control.
Unlike single-locale thrillers akin to Buried or Phone Booth, where a protagonist goes against an obvious, self-described villain, Bodell’s script never wavers from the potential that Clive is actually trying to help. As such, he’s doing many of the same things as Lena. He talks about his own familial tragedy as a widower with an estranged daughter. He tells her where the speaker is so she can better talk to him as more than a disembodied voice. And he shows genuine concern whenever Lena gets so worked up that her increased heart rate pushes the virus faster through her veins. So when the camera eventually pivots into the truck’s cab alongside him, we know that survival aspect is two-fold.
Because these characters aren’t dissimilar insofar as navigating life without the matriarch who served as their bedrock. Lena has become the estranged child to her own father, much like Clive is the estranged father to his. They are both out in the middle of nowhere by themselves and neither wants this to be the end of their story, no matter how much grief they hold. But you cannot deny the power dynamic intrinsic to Clive being in the literal driver’s seat, regardless of them being kidnapper / kidnapped or contagiously infirm / cautious transporter. The line separating both possibilities is thin without any recollection of getting sick or being saved. And trust in a horror film isn’t so easily won.
This is why Bodell places us in the trailer with Lena. We’re positioned to attempt figuring out the truth with her as bits and pieces of memory come into focus via an effective use of merged space and time that brings the forest and her friends into the Airstream. It’s like a projection of her thoughts providing flashes. Example: a hunter outside her tent becoming a silhouette behind the strings of beads separating kitchen from living quarters. Because we’re judging Clive’s actions as much as Lena is, we cannot help but lose faith in his intentions with each escalation in his caretaking process. Not until the vantage shifts to reveal he’s just as confused and scared as her.
It leads to a fantastic third act that allows Gorman and Terry to shine as human beings removed from present circumstances. Because we’ll eventually get to the point where Clive’s motives are laid bare and everything he’s said will be seen through that light. If he is the aggressor, whatever he’s said that isn’t true will be proven as lies. If he’s not the aggressor, everything that doesn’t come true might prove that lies were told to him. And if that’s the case, all bets are off as far as where things ultimately go. Is Lena truly sick? The black creeping through her veins would presume it, but maybe not? Are we dealing with a virus as we know them or is something supernatural at play too?
Nothing that unfolds is necessarily surprising in its authentic cause and effect, but the final 30 minutes are definitely unexpected once Liz Atwater and Jordan Mullins arrive to throw wrenches into the fray. Those characters coming into focus allows us to finally understand the full scope of Hellcat‘s mythology, but their true purpose is furthering Lena and Clive’s relationship. Because knowing what’s really happening to her and where he lands on the friend-or-foe spectrum is only half the battle. We still must know whether their attempts to survive will succeed, what it means to be a “good guy,” and to realize the dead never fully disappear. Only after understanding who they are, removed from external labels and pressures, will they know what it is they must do next.
Hellcat premiered at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival.