[CFF 2020 Review] Climate of the Hunter is Idiosyncratic, Weird, Absurd and Amazing

I’m not gonna lie, folks. Climate of the Hunter is weird. It’s so incredibly weird. And so unlike anything I typically watch. It’s not going to be for everyone. Hell, halfway through, I wasn’t sure it was going to be for me. I don’t quite understand it. And yet. And yet. I found it incredibly watchable and could not hit stop, even though I could have at any point. 

Co-written and directed by the super prolific Mickey Reece, Climate of the Hunter is an odd domestic drama that happens to feature a man who may, or may not, be a vampire. Alma (Ginger Gilmartin) lives in a campground cabin that feels centered completely in Appalachia. It’s rundown and rustic and she spends her time with her BFF, a weed-smoking country boy named BJ Beavers (Jacob Snovel). Her high-profiled lawyer sister Elizabeth (Mary Buss) has just flown in from D.C. because their childhood friend Wesley (Ben Hall) is coming in from overseas. 

Recently divorced, Alma is an odd duck who dresses like a Bohemian bum crossed with a 70s glam rockstar. She wears circular glasses that bring to mind John Lennon while showcasing a red dress, a frilly, fluffy white coat and a dog named Otis who wears a neck cone like it’s a fashion accessory. It’s safe to say that Alma looks completely out of step with her rural location. 

When Wesley shows up in his sweet mustang, the sisters watch him carry his luggage to his cabin with barely disguised lust. He’s an older man. Distinguished. A writer who waxes poetically in his journal and smokes from an oddly shaped, hooked pipe. He’s married, but had his wife Genevieve (Laurie Cummings) committed to an asylum and is moving back to the states because giving Genevieve the care she needs outweighs any other concerns.

There’s a lot of history between the two sisters and Wesley. Both of them desperately want to fuck him and it’s obvious they’ve harbored that desire for awhile. Interjecting between the bickering melodrama are chapter marks and shots of food with descriptions like “Cheese fondue with a selection of sides.” 

In Climate of the Hunter, the food selections are as important as the drama. 

As we follow the two sisters and their bickering, more characters come in and out of the picture, including Wesley’s fey son Percy (Sheridan McMichael) and Alma’s daughter Rose (Danielle Evon Ploeger). They each provide context for the situation surrounding Wesley and add some background information on the characters, while also, in their respectively platonic and romantic ways, pining for Wesley’s attention. But as his vacation continues, Alma begins to suspect that Wesley might not be who he says he is...he might, in fact, be a vampire. 

This movie is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. As I said already, it’s weird. It lacks much of a narrative and is, instead, a bunch of soliloquies and monologues centered around increasingly awkward meals, which are all beautifully prepared and announced in an interjectory way. Mickey Reece and cinematographer Samuel Calvin film Climate of the Hunter as an old school vampire erotic thriller from the 70s. From the grainy, slightly muddled style to the 4:3 ratio to the period-appropriate dishes, the film could be a pastiche, except in the way it uses modern sensibilities and style. 

At the heart, it’s about innocuous civility that hides deep-seated anger. Each time the characters end up at dinner, what begins as a pleasant dinner between friends catching up starts to turn awkward as inner truths come to the table. Whether that’s a shot of Alma’s daughter, Rose from Wesley’s predatory perspective to Percy’s son, who shows up ready to read from his explicit (sexual, not violent) short stories where a character wonders about the dick size of a man who’s cheating on his wife, each dinner goes from complacity to awkwardness to anger as truths come out. 

Then there’s the  vampire mythos that circles the characters like a dense fog. As Alma gets further convinced Wesley is a vampire, she smokes joints with country boy BJ who waxes poetically that “Creatures of the night are malignant species...they don’t have love for love itself.” Meanwhile, Wesley compares the sisters to various stars in the sky which brighten as they stare up at them and are almost enveloped by the cosmicality of their situation. 

And then Wesley will vomit a bloody tampon at dinner. 

It all feels just slightly surreal and out of touch. But it’s anchored in some truly fantastic performances that come off as absurdly theatrical in the beginning. Climate of the Hunter  dips into melodrama constantly and presents these larger-than-life characters, but the authenticity each actor brings to their character somehow grounds the more outlandish bits. The sudden mood shifts disarm and even when it ends as the beginning says it will, it does so with the tongue-in-cheek mentality of playing ping-pong by yourself. 

Idiosyncratic to the end, Climate of the Hunter managed to win me over. And while I still don’t quite know what I watched, I found myself unable to look away and, of all the movies I saw during this fest, it’s one I keep thinking about.