Hounded (2022) Review – Class War and Middle Class Leftist Hypocrisy

Hounded (2022)
Director: Tommy Boulding
Production Year: 2022
Country: United Kingdom
Genre: Thriller, Horror
Running Time: 94 minutes
Cast: Samantha Bond, James Lance, Nobuse Jnr, Malachi Pullar-Latchman, Hannah Traylen, Ross Coles

There is a particular kind of British film that announces, within the first ten minutes, exactly what it thinks of you. Hounded is one of these. It is made by and for lefties, and it leans heavily on the assumption that the audience will instinctively sympathise with a gang of thieving degenerates while hissing at the upper classes. I did not.

The premise is simple enough. A group of small-time London thieves break into a country estate for what is meant to be a routine job. They are caught and then released—only to discover they have been turned into prey in a grotesque revival of the aristocratic hunting tradition. Horns sound, dogs are loosed, the countryside becomes a killing field. It is, as satire, not subtle.

We are clearly meant to like the thieves. They are given backstories, traumas, motivations, and the usual collection of excuses that modern cinema confuses with character. I found them entirely objectionable. I despise the underclass, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. They steal, they lie, and they drift through life with the expectation that the world owes them something. When they are injured or killed, the film expects us to feel outrage. I did not. Indeed, I was disappointed that one of them was allowed to survive. I enjoyed the suffering of those who died, and was hoping for a clean sweep.

That said, the upper classes fare no better. The Redwick family, who conduct the hunt, are presented as monstrous caricatures of aristocratic decay. They speak in hollow clichés about tradition and order while indulging in what is, essentially, ritualised murder. This is not entirely unfair. The British upper classes sold out at least a century ago to the monied interests. They ceased to rule and became instead a decorative front for those who actually hold power. In doing so, they forfeited any claim to respect. If history were just, they would have received the same treatment as the French aristocracy in the 1790s.

And yet, even here, the film misses something. The Redwicks are too theatrical, too self-aware. Real elites are rarely so explicit about their contempt. They do not announce their worldview. They embody it. This reduces what might have been unsettling into something closer to pantomime.

There is, however, one notable exception. Samantha Bond, as Katherine Redwick, gives a solid and controlled performance. She avoids the temptation to overplay the role, and there are moments where she almost suggests a different kind of character: someone who genuinely believes in what she is doing, rather than merely enjoying it. If the upper classes were all like her—composed, and possessed of some internal logic—there might be less need for the guillotine.

The film is, in technical terms, well made. The pacing is brisk, the cinematography effective, and the action sequences handled with competence. There is a certain grim energy to the chase scenes, and the use of the countryside as a hunting ground is visually strong. It never feels cheap, which is more than can be said for much of modern British cinema. I also enjoyed it.

This is not a contradiction. A film can be ideologically objectionable and still entertaining. Hounded succeeds as a piece of violent, fast-moving nonsense. It does not succeed as social commentary, because its understanding of class is both crude and wholly incorrect. The division it presents—noble poor versus monstrous rich—is comforting to those who wish to avoid thinking too hard about how power actually works.

In reality, both groups are contemptible—the underclass because its members should never have been born, and the upper class because they have enabled the underclass and let it loose on the rest of us. The film, of course, cannot say this. It must choose a side. It chooses badly.

Even so, I found it worth watching. Not for its message, which is tiresome, but for its execution, which is competent, and for the occasional glimpse of something sharper that might have been, had its makers possessed a little more courage and a little less middle class leftist sanctimony.