The Everglades region of Florida has seen a rise in invasive species over the last four decades, but none with the power to capture the public imagine quite like the Burmese Python. An import from the other side of the globe, the giant constrictor is a menacing figure that is easily panicked over and vastly misunderstood. To combat the growing numbers of pythons in Florida, the state has initiated hunts for the snake. This, despite no reptilian invasion ever being repelled in the history of the world.
Courtesy Oscilloscope
Indeed, the film may focus on several people and their stories as they participate in these hunts, but the real point of the film is how the snake, while acknowledged as a problem, has become a way to shift blame and create a sensation. Instead, other factors-greed, pollution and human encroachment-are likely having greater impact on the state of the Everglades. Yet, the film does not force any one view, wisely allowing the viewer to reach their own conclusions while examining the motivations, lives and experiences of its various subjects.
This is a film that mixes visual styles. It is at once starkly real and yet almost noirish. It uses colors, faded and vibrant, to great effect. The scenes at night of hunting the snakes through the bush and along ever busier roads, seems to mesh the cinema verité of the French New Wave with the post-World War Two debut of film noir, where the dark alleys and seedy bars filled with mobsters, molls and panic, are instead filled with palm trees, snakes and a bevy of people working through various emotional problems.
Courtesy Oscilloscope
Indeed, the film is ultimately a look at what drives these people, who come from all over the country and all economic strata, to participate in the attempted genocide of a reptilian species, with answers and non-answers that will leave you with as many questions as when you first met them. You have a father and daughter who have been doing this since she was a young child, an old woman-recently widowed-who partners with a local writer in order to kill a snake, several families and loners with various motivations and a former marine who uses two guys with a truck “to help me look for these things in the dark”
Some of these people seem very reasonable, and others seem to be in need of a good therapist, yet all are compelling figures. The film also knows there is some weirdness here and while it does not fully lean in, it does have fun with the topic, going so far as to use serpentine font for some of the onscreen printed information. For all this, though, the film does use the hunt in order to draw, too little and too lightly, attention to other problems. It is a stealth ecological work dressed up as something more bizarre, which waits too long to introduce its real thesis and which might better have served itself and its audience by being more upfront, and thereby more potently juxtaposing the futility of the hunt with the real and pressing problems facing the environment.
Courtesy Oscilloscope
This does not wholly detract from the film but it does limit the ability of this reviewer to fully recommend it, without the reservations that come with such a reality. We also do not really get to deeply know more than a few of these subjects, in part because the film tries too hard to be everything for everyone and ultimately winds up being for very few. It is a fascinating almost, not at all a failure, but a film with serious warts that passionately, if not seriously, raises important questions about how the world lets itself get pushed into panics.
The Python Hunt is now playing in select theaters.
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