- UK release: August 2022 (Disney+)
- Director: Dan Trachtenberg · Writer: Patrick Aison
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Studios; Davis Entertainment; Hulu / Disney+
- Genre: Science fiction survival thriller · Runtime: 100 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Amber Midthunder (Legion) as Naru; Dakota Beavers as Taabe; Dane DiLiegro as the Predator; Michelle Thrush (Blackstone) as Aruka
- IMDb: 7.1 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 94% critics / 74% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The Predator franchise has spent thirty-five years failing to recapture a film it made by accident. The 1987 original worked because it was a war picture that turned into a monster picture, a squad of muscle being picked off one by one until the smallest, smartest survivor was the only one left thinking. Everything since has tried to scale that up: more soldiers, more guns, more Predators, a crossover with the Alien xenomorphs that pleased nobody. Prey goes the other way. It strips the idea back to one hunter, one creature and a stretch of wilderness, sets it on the Northern Great Plains in 1719, and remembers that the franchise was always at its best when it was at its leanest.
The setup
Naru (Amber Midthunder) is a young Comanche woman who wants to be a hunter in a community that has already decided what she is allowed to be. Her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) is the gifted one, the warrior the others follow; she tracks, she studies, she notices the things they miss. When a strange light falls from the sky and the animals she knows start turning up flayed and wrong, she is the only one who reads the signs correctly. What she has seen is a Predator, dropped into her territory to test itself against whatever the land can throw at it. The trouble is that nobody believes her, and by the time they do, the thing has already started working its way up the food chain towards them.
The cast
The film rests almost entirely on Midthunder, and she carries it. Naru is watchful rather than loud, and the performance is built out of competence under pressure: the way she reads a footprint, the patience of someone who has had to be twice as good to be taken half as seriously. There is no speechifying about proving herself; the proof is in the doing. Beavers gives Taabe real warmth as the brother who believes in her when the others will not, which matters because the film needs that bond to mean something. Dane DiLiegro’s Predator, all physical performance under the design, is a genuinely frightening presence, faster and more animal than the lumbering versions the sequels settled for. The supporting players, including Michelle Thrush as Naru’s mother Aruka, keep the community grounded enough that the stakes feel local and human.
The craft
Dan Trachtenberg made his name on 10 Cloverfield Lane, a film that wrung tension out of three people in a bunker, and the same control is on show here. Jeff Cutter’s photography of the plains and forests is genuinely beautiful, wide and cold and open, which makes the violence land harder when it arrives. Trachtenberg understands that a hunt is about patience, and he is willing to hold back, to let Naru watch and wait, before the creature moves. When it does, the action is brutal and legible, no shaky-cam mush, every kill clearly staged. Sarah Schachner’s score sits low and tribal until it needs to surge. There is also a clever escalation built into the structure: the Predator works its way through wolves, a bear, French fur trappers and Comanche warriors, and each rung shows you exactly how far above Naru it sits, so that her eventual answer to it has to be cleverness rather than strength.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the 1987 Predator, and Prey earns it by inverting the formula: where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch was the biggest man in the jungle reduced to a frightened animal, Naru starts as the underestimated one and has to think her way up. The period survival texture owes a clear debt to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, with its chase through unforgiving wilderness, and there is a kinship with the cold brutality of The Revenant. What Prey adds is the science fiction engine underneath, the puzzle of an enemy whose technology is simply better than yours, so that the only way to beat it is to turn its own rules against it. That is the franchise’s best idea, and this is the first film in a long time to actually use it.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have embraced it, sitting around 94%, with most of the praise going to Midthunder, the period setting and the back-to-basics discipline. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm at 74%, and the gap is worth a moment. Some of that is the streaming-only release, dropped straight onto Disney+ rather than given a cinema run it would have rewarded; some is a section of the fanbase that wanted more Predators and more carnage. I land closer to the critics, with a caveat. The film is very good at what it sets out to do and rarely surprising beyond it: you can see the shape of the story coming. But it is tight, confident and genuinely tense, and it respects both its heroine and its monster.
Verdict
This is the Predator film the series has needed for three decades, and the most rewatchable entry since the original. It is lean where the sequels were bloated, smart where they were loud, and built around a heroine who wins on wits rather than firepower. The plot holds few mysteries, and a cinema screen would have flattered Cutter’s landscapes in a way a laptop never will. None of that stops it being a tense, satisfying survival thriller with a real lead performance at its centre. It works completely as the thing it is trying to be, and I will happily watch it again. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Disney+ in the UK from 5 August 2022. There is no cinema release; this one went straight to the platform.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Prey quickly established itself as the high-water mark of the modern Predator run and turned Dan Trachtenberg into the steward of the franchise. A Comanche-language dub was made available on Disney+, the first time a major studio film has offered a full dub in the language, and it is the version worth seeking out. The film remains on Disney+, with a physical release following later for those who want Jeff Cutter’s plains on a screen larger than a laptop.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, injury detail, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: A fantastical alien creature stabs, slashes, shoots, dismembers and decapitates people, with sight of blood spurts; some of this violence is obscured by camera framing. The creature slashes and stabs various animals and we also see spurts of fantastical glowing alien blood. There are bloody stabbings and slashes as human characters fight, as well as punches, kicks, knees and shoves in scenes of hand to hand fighting. Animals are hunted and cooked for food.
Threat and horror: There are sustained scenes of suspense and threat as an alien creature hunts people through woodland and in settlements. There are jump scares and sequences in which characters try to escape ferocious animal attacks. A girl finds her herself at risk of drowning in a bog.
Language: There is mild bad language (‘shit’) and use of the similar French term ‘merde’.
Discrimination: Some male characters behave in a sexist way towards a teenage girl, telling her she should be cooking instead of joining their hunt.
Injury detail: We see severed human heads and limbs, as well as bloody slash and stab wounds in the aftermath of violence; some of these injuries are treated with close-up detail. A character discovers a herd of skinned buffalo, with close-up sight of their bloody injuries. Blood and gore spills from the bodies of fatally wounded animals.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
