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Staunch Test DEBATE.

A hiking trip set up as a bachelor party weekend doesn’t go as planned when five friends desperately struggle to survive as a mysterious shooter tries to kill them. 

Prey is a slow paced German thriller-survival movie from Thomas Seiben which lacks suspense and is an overall disappointment. The premise is nothing new, someone is killing the hikers and as they run away they try to find out who wants them dead and why. The problem is that the killer is shown very early in the movie making the viewer poorly interested in what’s going to happen next, so the audience just waits for all of them to die and that is not very entertaining. 

There are two different plot lines to follow here. The first one deals with the relationship between the hikers that is not good at all. One of them had an affair with the bride-to-be and Roman (David Kross), the future husband, finds that out during the movie. The second one should be about the killer’s motivation.

The mysterious shooter is a woman (Maria Ehrich) and Roman later finds out that she is on a killing rampage because her daughter was killed by some probably drunk men playing with a rifle in the woods. This is all the knowledge we have of that woman, her character, just like any other character in the movie, has no development at all. She doesn’t have any lines and I had to look on IMDb.com to find out what her name was, apparently she’s called Eva. When Roman confronts her in the end she acts nonsensically. He doesn’t kill her, he just disarms her throwing her rifle away. She looks at him, doesn’t say anything and jumps from a cliff killing herself. It looks like they really tried to give this movie a deep ending but that doesn’t really work since the viewer is given so little information on all the characters. It just looks silly and pointless.

When Roman disarms and stops Eva he doesn’t really hurt her however, a young receptionist is shot and killed when the guys seek shelter in a lodge and, during a flashback, we see Eva’s daughter being killed by mistake by those men. Eva kills herself in the end so I wouldn’t count that, men and women are both killed equally in this movie and there is no sexualisation whatsoever. However, I don’t think Eva would have killed the hikers if they were women, she definitely has a problem with men. I would say that Prey is a #StaunchTestDebate.

Simona Columbano

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