Prey is a 2019 thriller about a young man who must survive on an island retreat while a sinister force hunts him.
Toby (Logan Miller) is a typical teenager, wanting to relax on the sofa with his smartphone rather than go help his dad (Anthony Jensen) out in the driveway fixing that old car. It’s a choice he’ll soon regret as masked thieves make off with the car, leaving Toby’s father murdered on the driveway. It’s a devastating moment. In an effort to cope with the loss, Toby joins an unorthodox recovery group, which has him and other troubled teens working together on a sailboat before each are dropped off on small, separate islands for three days to survive on their own in hopes of finding some balance. However, Toby finds he’s not exactly alone, entangled in a fight for his life against a horned beast, soon finding help in a 16-year-old girl named Madeleine (Kristine Froseth), who has been keeping alive on her own since she was child.
Things move along quickly with director Franck Khalfoun‘s curious take on what could be loosely influenced by The Most Dangerous Game, opening with a deadly attack and then straight to the shores of a seemingly tropical paradise. It dabbles briefly with Toby’s crushing feelings of guilt before rushing straight into the perplexing mysteries of the island, one that finds the boy partnered with a beautiful girl and a host of secrets. Let’s just say this a plot with a lot tossed in the bag and it’s supremely weird because of it, the film never really finding any sense of authenticity to its premise nor successfully making it work as allegory for something else.
That probably begins with Madeleine, who, after supposedly living by herself for years on a deserted island looks like a well-tended model in a crop top and fitted shorts. But forgiving that, the screenplay misses larger opportunities to make Toby’s recovery impactful by making this a standard monster in the dark flick, and while that could (and should) be interpreted to be metaphorical, is not nearly as thoughtful about that as it feels ready to be.
The problem is our sense of investment, which is dashed at the very start with none of what Toby is part of feeling remotely plausible, the plot getting him to the island as fast and carefree as possible. But how on Earth could a young man his age be even allowed to get abandoned on a supposedly uninhabited island with his lack of training in the first place? It makes no sense, and even if we swallow the pill and fall down the rabbit hole in suspending disbelief, what follows makes even less sense, the anctics obvious in providing fodder for the beast lurking in the shadows. There’s some earnest attempts at layering this in some creepy, otherworldly sense of horror – this is a good looking effort – but it doesn’t capitalize on Toby’s fragility or Madeleine’s potential, leaving this a generic and contrived creature feature with all the usual toothy expectations. You get the sense that at some point, it wants to leap over the cliff and in so doing, sort of succeeds in reaching for the crazy, but for the way it starts, it’s disappointing not to have this be a more emotional journey of what it takes to deal with horrific loss.