Fantasia Film Festival 2020 Screening – Screening as part of the online 2020 Fantasia Film Festival, Climate of the Hunter is a vampire movie… or is it? With a meticulously constructed narrative, director and co-writer Mickey Reece uses dream-like sequences and innuendo to make the audience question the roles and intentions of each character. With standout performances from actresses Mary Buss and Ginger Gilmartin, Climate of the Hunter had authentic-feeling relationships between its characters, however, did not feel like a real vampire movie to me.

The film follows two sisters who meet at their family cabin to reconnect with an old childhood neighbor Wesley (Ben Hall). After sharing a dinner together, romantic feelings are ignited within sister Alma (Ginger Gilmartin), a free-spirit who is treated like a basketcase by her family due to her messy life. The potential relationship causes more tension between herself and her reserved sister Elizabeth (Mary Buss), who is also interested in having a romance with Wesley. As the two grow closer to Wesley and further apart from each other, Alma realizes that Wesley may not be the same charming boy from their childhood, as both her dreams and her nosey backwoods neighbor allude to a sinister change within Wesley.

Ben Hall plays alleged vampire Wesley with an unaffected air, a-typical of the normally romanticized portrayal of this most classic cinema monster — the vampyr. He could be any world-traveled and handsomely aged man, which gives the movie its mystery of whether he is actually a vampire or not. His tempered performance and the movie’s slow delivery produce a melodramatic feel from the outset, though the climax has a small blip of horror. For 95% of the movie, I did not get the tense, thrilling atmosphere I was expecting from a “vampire” movie titled Climate of the Hunter. The lingering, intellectual conversations give this movie a pretentious tone, and the slow pace of events was much slower than I would expect for a vampire movie. Not that I was expecting action like Blade, but for a very long time nothing vampire-like happens — it is scenes of dinners with various guests, intermixed with scenes of Wesley charming each sister, followed by scenes of the sister bickering about it.

The production is not the worst, it’s adequate enough to be watchable for most audiences. It is dangerously close to looking like a shot-on-video movie, but it is undoubtedly artsy and plays with soap opera-like lighting and uses a lot of quick zoom-ins for dramatic effect to create an original directorial style for Mickey Reece. The dual female dynamic between the sisters and the movie’s surreal visuals seemed to take inspiration from Ingmar Bergman, with use of crimson hues, fading symbolic images into other symbolic images to create metaphors and imply meaning, and close framing on eyes to show the turmoil bubbling beneath the surface of a character. This movie plays out more like a ‘women of a certain age’ melodrama than a vampire movie, concluding with no character development — each character is the same as they began, if not worse — and a sardonic and inconclusive ending.

If you found Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) slow then Mickey Reece’s Climate of the Hunter may be excruciating. The vampirism is lost in the mix of drama between the characters and does not show its teeth, literally and figuratively, until about the last 20 minutes — the characters are resigned to wax philosophical or emote all over each other. The lack of notable vampire tropes happening plays into the psychological aspect of the story that poses the question of whether Alma is creating a monster in her head or if there is actually a monster walking among them, but it also makes the scenes that definitively show that Wesley is a vampire seem like lies more than clever red herrings, same for the scenes that definitively show that Alma is crazy, like with her talking dog — both are competing to be the truth.

MOVIE RATING — 6 out of 10