Night of the Hunted Plot Summary
Currently streaming on Shudder is Night of the Hunted, a tense and suspenseful thriller about a woman named Alice who, with her colleague John, stops off at a gas station in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately for Alice, her chances of leaving the gas station alive are slim. Shortly after entering, she is wounded by a bullet from a sniper’s rifle. Fearing for her life, she tries to make a run for it but the sniper continues to shoot at her.
Does Alice survive this nightmarish ordeal?
Let’s take a closer look at the movie.
Why does Alice stop off at the gas station?
After attending a convention with John, who is both her colleague and her lover, the two of them stop off at a gas station to fill up the car’s tank and to pick up some snacks.
Upon entering the gas station’s store, Alice is alarmed to discover blood stains on the counter. The reason for this is quickly revealed when a sniper starts shooting at her and she finds the dead body of Amelia, who has already been killed by the gunman.
While seated in the car, John notices the gas tank is low again. This is because the sniper has taken aim at the car and perforated the tank with bullet holes. John enters the store to find out why Alice is taking so long and is immediately shot dead by the killer.
Is Alice able to get help?
Alice finds a two-way radio at the counter when she hears a man talking through it, asking for Amelia. Alice begs him to call the police, which he seemingly goes on to do.
But it’s all a trick. The man doesn’t call the police. As their conversation continues, Alice discovers the man she is talking to is the sniper who is shooting at her from afar.
Why does the sniper attack Alice?
It’s difficult to say. At first, it would appear to be a random attack. He had already killed Amelia, who he claimed was his cheating wife. When Alice entered the store, it could be assumed that he tried to shoot Alice to stop her from revealing the murder.
But during the conversation between Alice and the sniper, we realize he knows certain things about her. He somehow knows that she was cheating on her husband with John. He also knows about her job as a marketer for a pharmaceutical firm.
Does Alice become his target because she reminds him of his cheating wife? Or does the sniper want her dead because of her job? The latter seems possible as he holds her responsible for the death of others, due to the role she has in marketing drugs that have caused fatalities.
We never get to find out the real reason behind his decision to shoot her. It might simply be that he is using her adultery and job position as false excuses to kill her. Even if she wasn’t cheating on her husband or working for a drug company, he might have targeted her anyway, for the simple reason of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After all, she isn’t the only person who falls victim to the sniper’s bullets. While she is hiding in the store, others are killed too. These include a man named Doug who calls in to see Amelia and an elderly couple who are killed by the sniper when they stop off to get gas.
One person who isn’t killed is Cindy, the young granddaughter of the couple who manages to make it inside the store to take shelter with Alice.
Does Alice survive her nightmarish ordeal?
After failing to kill Alice, the shooter leaves his sniper position and heads to the gas station to finish her off. Alice tells Cindy to hide in a storage room and then arms herself with whatever she can find to fend off the approaching killer.
When the shooter walks inside the store, he asks her to guess his identity. Could he be here at the behest of her husband who has hired him to kill her for cheating? Or is he a former co-worker whose job ended because of Alice? Or is he a psychopath who likes killing people? These are some of the questions he poses when he taunts Alice but he never reveals his actual motives.
Eventually, the two of them get into a physical confrontation. She manages to stab him with a shard of broken glass but this isn’t enough to end his life, as he is able to overpower Alice and shoot her.
After Alice falls to the ground, the shooter makes his way towards Cindy and tells her not to be afraid. Just as he is removing his mask, Alice uses her last ounce of strength to hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher. She then crushes his head beneath a car lift which kills him.
So, Alice has survived the night, right? No. After disposing of the shooter, she slumps to the ground, succumbs to her wounds and dies. The only survivor is Cindy who, traumatized by everything she has just seen, runs out into the night towards the highway. Here’s hoping she made her way to a place of safety!
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Pathetic film absolutely car wash
Interesting, thanks Hadiman, I appreciate your thoughts.
Lee 🙂
if u play scene in early movie when alice video call with her husband and compare to the scene at 1.15.45,u heard a same voice. so i believe 100% the shooter is her husband
Movie is as stupid as people who snap out n kill bunch
Thanks for your thoughts, much appreciated. There is a lot to unpick in the movie, more than appears on the surface. I like your analysis so thank you for sharing that with us.
Lee
It was somehow related to her husband or indeed Alice was in the wrong place at the wrong time. One theory is that the shooter is an angry army vet who had his daughter taken away and the entire thing was done for him to get to the little girl at the end, Cindy. He new Alice’s full name after she told it to him during the start of their conversations over the 2-way radio before he had revealed himself as the killer, further he could have run her company car’s plate number through a darkweb database to find her work details and then made the presumption that she was cheating on the husband with her colleuge given his observations of her ring, body language when she was leaving the car and the fact that they were driving at the odd hour of morning could have all been indicative of her cheating. The fact that their engine was leaking gas could likely be a red herring, inconsequential to the main narrative. We were never given the killer’s face at the end because chances are it’s meaningless to us as the audience and only relevant to Cindy. Thus, it would be a poetic tragedy that the child was left without a father at the end and that his face should get crushed; further more that they should kill one another at the end: he, a father trying to get his child back, and Alice, a childless woman struggling with infertility and on her way to a fertility clinic!