Hungerford Review (Film, 2014)
content warning: foul language, homophobia, shaking cameras, blood, gore
Cowen has to film a week in his life for his university class. The day he starts is the day a bizarre weather anomaly appears over the town of Hungerford. This glowing mass of clouds is destroying buildings and breaking all communication devices in town.
Hungerford is one of those post-Cloverfield found footage films about an unnatural disaster. A group of partying young people document what could be the end of the world, not realizing the severity of the situation happening around them.
This film focuses on the antics of the young people. They get drunk, prank each other, and lack any kind of situational awareness. People are dying in the streets, and they’re too focused on their social lives to care.
The weather destroys communication. Phones and radios are the first step. The energy destroys the need or desire to interact with other people. Some of the affected are aggressive towards groups of people and any electronic devices. Others become injured out of nowhere, bleeding without cause. None of the effects can be stopped.
Hungerford aims for realism. The camerawork intentionally feels like an amateur holding a camera. No one looks good onscreen, as no one is meant to know how to properly film people. The camera shifts in and out of focus. They shoot more people than not from underneath their chins, distorting their faces.
They film everything without a plan. Scenes start and stop for no reason. The camera gets passed around from person to person to cover different things. Even when they set the camera down, it’s with no real care. The results look like a student using a camera for the first time.
The style detracts from the plot. The story is very episodic with no real order or reason for the events. It’s a scattered collection of characters and scenes that occasionally result in a scare. The shaky, unfocused camerawork makes it harder to build a suspenseful scene.
There is an interesting sci-fi/horror story when you get far enough into Hungerford. You need to make it almost 45 minutes into an 80 minute film to see it. Even when the characters onscreen swear they’re going to film everything, the footage still jumps around, literally shaking so the action isn’t in focus and cutting from event to event without direct continuity. The scares you can see are effective, but the dirty business of “students who don’t know how to use a camera are filming” used to disguise the rough edges often leaves you with nothing of significance to look at.
Hungerford is streaming on Netflix.
