Brexit has been conspicuous by its absence so far in British cinema. So for the time being we have to make do with faint echoes in the likes of Hounded, which in its B-movie-ish way deals with the current deep divisions in English society and nostalgia for Blighty’s heyday. Pitting a group of Peckham housebreakers against the fox-hunting set, its satire is blunt-nosed and its prole-coursing spree never quite devious enough. But it still has a certain vindictive thrill.
Leon (Nobuse Jr) is the leader of a crew of thieves about to pull one last job in order to bankroll the studies of Chaz (Malachi Pullar-Latchman). Along with domestic abuse survivor Vix (Hannah Traylen) and Polish immigrant Tod (Ross Coles), they bust into a sprawling manor, but are jumped and tasered by the inhabitants. They wake up in a nearby field to a lecture from local gentry Katherine Redwick (Samantha Bond, ex-Miss Moneypenny) about upholding “a natural order – one that has guided this small island to the very peak of civilisation”. But she lets them go, or so they think until hunting horns sound from over the rise.
Making the underclass into human quarry, it’s a little on-the-nose as far as class satire goes. Debut director Tommy Boulding doesn’t really develop the social comment any further, despite the odd good gag, like Chaz’s bewilderment confronted with a rotary-dial phone (the ultimate sign of being in creepy folk-horror land). It doesn’t help that the villainous end of the cast feels a bit tepid, with Bond’s Redwick and her brother (played by James Lance) more primly nagging than abhorrent posho monstrosities. At the same time Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.
• Hounded is released 28 October in cinemas and on digital platforms.
