Brock Bodell’s debut feature-length creates a nexus point between locked room mystery, an old-fashioned monster movie, a kidnap flick, a claustrophobic exercise, a meditation on depression and grief, a psychological horror, and the collision of two family dramas. In doing so, Hellcat reconciles horror’s present and past and provides proof that some of the genre’s oldest monsters still have more to offer. Old dogs can, evidently, learn new tricks.
Bodell’s background is in directing and editing music videos, documentaries, and TV promos. And it shows. The ninety-minute film is masterfully edited, with a forensic attention to continuity. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the first act where Lena (Dakota Gorman) wakes up disorientated and alone, inside the confined space of a camper trailer, with an infected wound and no recollection of how she got there. A disembodied voice (Todd Terry) tells her they’re en route to a doctor, but if they don’t make it within an hour, she’ll suffer a horrific fate.
The camera work is kinetic and tight, shifting from fixed positions to moving quick and fluid about the space, as everything rocks back and forth, selling the illusion of motion. Tangible sound design adds greater verisimilitude, with the trailer’s clicks and knocks like a deep cut from early Throbbing Gristle, while the bead curtains tick like clockwork, creating an unbearable sense of Lena’s time running out. The score itself shifts from a southern gothic whistle, rooting the viewer geographically, alongside synthwave and intense, industrial electronic that bleeds into the diegetic sound and hits more like Arca.
Infection narratives feel different in a post-pandemic world, something Bodell uses to his advantage. The nature of Lena’s condition shifts throughout, though Hellcat is far more interesting an animal than offering empty twists and reveals. As the infection begins to erode her grip on reality, there is a Nicolas Roeg quality in the intermixing of past into present, externalising Lena’s memories into the microcosm of the trailer’s interior, staged in almost still frames like dioramas. All the while, closeups of her blood vessels fill the screen as the infection spreads. Later, videos of childhood recordings and mobile phone footage are spliced in, adding to the visual collage and Lena’s gradual loss of self. Everything is well seeded, growing cell by cell, until the truth is undeniable.
Where the film is most subversive is in its heartfelt look at family dynamics and to what extent we exist through the eyes of others. Delivered by different actors, this might have fallen flat, but Gorman gives a star turn in her moments of sheer agony as much as when she’s problem-solving or in introspection. A scene when she gazes up at the moon carries an emotional resonance matched only by its beauty. Terry, meanwhile, brings a dignity and warmth, sitting somewhere between the best of Sam Rockwell and Matthew McConaughey, articulating key themes of fatherhood, loss, and regret.
However, the sidelining of woman of colour Ollie (Liz Atwater) in favour of the white protagonist’s development and arc — indeed, reducing her to little more than a plot device and narrative reveal — leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. And Bodell extrapolating horror from pregnancy and birth as a man sans uterus in a film centred on a woman’s bodily autonomy feels misguided to say the least.
Nevertheless, Hellcat is a highly inventive film that uses horror traditions to play with audience expectation, and creative editing within an enclosed environment to disorientate and mesmerise. While balancing body horror and the tension of a countdown, Bodell proves there’s nothing new under the moon, it’s all in how you put the pieces together.
DISTRIBUTOR
Blue Finch
DIRECTOR
Brock Bodell
SCREENPLAY
Brock Bodell
CAST
Dakota Gorman
Todd Terry
DIGITAL (UK, IE, AU, NZ)
14 August 2026
