"The Hunt" (2020)

The Hunt clearly wants to be a mirror held up to a badly divided America, albeit an extreme one, where the social media versions of left and right exist in a way that reality doesn’t support. It goes after political tribalism with a kind of gleeful brutality, insisting that cruelty, self-righteousness, and violence are not the private property of either the left or the right. I think that it would call this cartoonish excess “satire.”

Amazingly, the film actually starts closer to a Christian view of human nature than many movies that imagine evil always lives somewhere else. Sin and guilt are universal. We are all genuinely broken.

The problem is that The Hunt does not know what to do once it gets there. If everyone is guilty, then what? The only answers the film can imagine are survival, vengeance, and exposure. From a Christian perspective, that is not just a storytelling weakness. It is a theological one. A world that can diagnose sin but cannot imagine grace will almost always confuse cynicism with wisdom.

Seen through the lens of what Charles Taylor calls “Expressive Individualism” and Carl Trueman traces in its cultural fallout, The Hunt feels less like a clever satire of partisan politics and more like an accidental confession about secular moralism.

We were promised that rejecting transcendent moral authority would make us less judgmental. Instead, it has made us ruthless. Moral legitimacy now depends on authenticity, saying the right things, and aligning with the right narratives. The result is a culture that is every bit as pharisaical as the religious systems it congratulates itself for outgrowing, complete with purity tests, public shaming, and ritual punishment. What The Hunt simply cannot imagine is forgiveness. Expressive individualism has no category for it. There is only guilty or innocent, inside or outside, hunted or hunter.

This is where The Hunt ends up telling the truth by accident. It shows what happens when a society keeps its moral intensity but loses grace. Sin can be named, exposed, and even punished, but it can never be forgiven. Judgment is swift and final because there is no atonement, no mediator, and no hope of restoration.

The violence in the film is not just satire turned up too loud. It is the natural outcome of a moral vision that has cut justice loose from mercy. In the end, The Hunt does not so much critique our divided culture as embody it. It gives us a world full of Pharisees, utterly convinced of their righteousness, armed with verdicts, and unable to imagine a future that does not leave bodies behind.

The beauty of Christianity is the cross. This is the place where justice and love, holiness and mercy, meet. Grace is what we need in this divided world.