A Monster With Tiny Ears and Absolutely No Patience
I went into Hungry expecting the usual survival-horror machinery to start clanking into place. It usually does. A group of people go somewhere they should not go. Someone ignores a warning. Someone with more confidence than sense makes the decision that turns a bad afternoon into a body count. Then the threat begins picking them off one by one, often with enough regularity that you can almost hear the script checking names off a clipboard.
Sometimes that sort of thing still works.
It works when the setting has texture, when the characters are not completely disposable, when the creature has weight, when the film understands that suspense is not only the wait between deaths but the slow realisation that nobody has a good idea left. I was curious how Hungry was going to end because the premise had one genuinely odd advantage: the monster was a hippo.
Not a shark. Not an alligator. Not a snake, bear, wolf, lion, genetically irritated dinosaur, or any of the usual suspects who have already had their turn ruining holidays.
A hippo.
There is, obviously, a joke sitting right there in the title. Hungry cannot help but make you think of Hungry Hungry Hippos, that wonderfully frantic tabletop exercise in plastic gluttony and childhood noise. The film is not an official adaptation of the Hasbro game, though the association is difficult to miss and probably did the marketing no harm. (CULTURE CRYPT) Entertainment Weekly also described the title as a playful nod to the hippo-centric game, while making clear that the film sends its animal into the Louisiana bayou rather than into any official board-game universe. (EW.com)
The odd thing is that the joke does not quite make biological sense. Hippos are mostly herbivores. They are not lurking under the water because they have suddenly developed a taste for tourists in impractical footwear. But then, that is also what makes the film more interesting than its title. The hippo in Hungry is not really hungry in the usual monster-movie sense. It is territorial. It is maternal. It is enormous. It is very, very angry.
And I did not know hippos could be that frikkin’ scary.
I knew, in the vague way we know things from wildlife documentaries and alarming internet lists, that hippos are dangerous. But knowing a fact and seeing it used as horror machinery are two different things. San Diego Zoo notes that a human boater entering hippo territory risks an aggressive response, and that female hippos, especially mothers with calves, can be dangerous and unpredictable. (San Diego Zoo Animals & Plants) BBC Earth is even more direct, describing hippos as extremely dangerous animals with huge jaws and long canine teeth. (BBC Earth) So yes, technically the film is not inventing the menace. It is just removing the slightly comic cultural filter that makes hippos look like bath toys with dental problems.
That may be Hungry’s neatest trick. It starts with a title that sounds like a joke and then says, with a straight face: no, actually, this animal will ruin you.
The Set-Up, or Another Holiday Planned by People Who Hate Themselves
Hungry is a 2026 British survival thriller written and directed by James Nunn, produced by Ben Jacques, and backed by Signature Entertainment, which lists the film as a UK production in the survival-thriller genre. (Signature Entertainment) It stars Madison Davenport as Sistine, Tracey Bonner as Dionne, Joaquim de Almeida as Walker, Michel Curiel as Rodrigo, Samantha Coughlan as Sally, Olivia Bernstone as Hannah, Jim Meskimen as Tim, and River Codack as Mikey. (Wikipedia)
The premise is beautifully simple in the way animal-attack films need to be simple. A group of holidaymakers go on a swamp tour in Louisiana. They leave the normal route. They enter the wrong patch of water. A giant hippopotamus objects.
There is something reassuringly old-fashioned about that structure. Not clever, exactly. More like sturdy. Hungry understands the basic architecture: introduce a small group, give them just enough personal business to make them recognisable, strand them somewhere awkward, then let nature — or in this case one deeply unreasonable megaherbivore — begin correcting their life choices.
Sistine is the obvious emotional centre. She is on holiday in New Orleans with her best friend Hannah, but not in the breezy, aspirational, travel-brochure way. She is dealing with her mother’s illness and has recently lost her job. (CULTURE CRYPT) That is enough to give her a fragile quality without turning her into a grand tragic figure. She feels like someone who is already carrying failure before the film throws a hippo at her, which is rude but cinematically useful.
Hannah is the friend who pushes the trip into motion, the sort of person who thinks a bad mood can be fixed with energy, encouragement, and perhaps an activity booked with insufficient research. Olivia Bernstone plays her as a warmer presence than the script strictly needs, which makes her eventual death feel less like a routine casualty and more like the removal of Sistine’s emotional support system.
Dionne, played by Tracey Bonner, is the businesswoman whose impatience and entitlement help push the group off course. She secretly pays Rodrigo to take them several miles away from the approved route so she can photograph a famously huge alligator called Big Ben. (CULTURE CRYPT) In a different version of this film, Dionne would be nothing but the obnoxious one you are waiting to see punished. Hungry does not entirely avoid that function, but it gives her enough tension and self-interest to make her more than a walking bad decision in high heels.
Rodrigo is the guide who knows the swamp well enough to sound competent but not well enough to recognise that he is now inside the wrong film. Walker, played by Joaquim de Almeida, is the grizzled older hunter who understands the hippo threat better than the tourists do. He is introduced with the sort of line that tells you exactly which shelf he lives on in the creature-feature cupboard. Bloody Disgusting’s review notes that Walker says, “The only cute hippo is a dead hippo,” which is not exactly subtle, but subtlety is not why anyone boards this boat. (Bloody Disgusting!)
Then there is Sally, her father Tim, and her teenage son Mikey. They give the film its family unit, which means the deaths can become cruel in a different register. Survival horror often uses families as emotional ballast. Put a parent, child, and grandparent in danger and you immediately get stakes beyond “please do not eat the tourists”. The problem, of course, is that the genre also treats family units like stacked crockery in an earthquake.
Everyone is doomed except the person the film has quietly chosen to harden.
A Hippo in the Bayou Should Be Ridiculous. It Mostly Is Not.
The setting does a lot of the work. Louisiana swampland is already loaded cinematic territory: heat, water, insects, rotting wood, bad visibility, folk danger, and the sense that everything is half-submerged and quietly waiting. Signature’s own synopsis places the film in the “mysterious and dangerous” Louisiana swamplands, with tourists lured off the beaten path into a survival fight against a hippopotamus concealed beneath the bayou water. (Signature Entertainment)
A hippo should feel absurd there. It is not native to Louisiana. The film has to explain that, and it does, through references to historical attempts to introduce hippos to the region and later records found at the abandoned alligator farm. (CULTURE CRYPT) This is where Hungry briefly becomes the sort of creature feature that rummages in strange history and says, “Actually, there was almost a precedent.” It does not overwork the idea, which is wise. Too much explanation would puncture the film’s blunt force. We do not need a dissertation on invasive megafauna. We need just enough backstory to stop the brain asking why the bayou has imported a tank with ears.
The first proper attack arrives after the group discovers Big Ben, the huge alligator they came to see, already mutilated. (CULTURE CRYPT) That is a useful escalation. The film cannot just tell us the hippo is dangerous. It has to show us that the animal has already taken the local apex-predator signage and torn it up.
Then the boat overturns.
This is where the film settles into its strongest mode: people trapped on or near water they can no longer trust. Animal-attack films often work best when the environment becomes the creature’s accomplice. In Jaws, the ocean is too large. In The Shallows, the shore is too close and still unreachable. In Crawl, the floodwater turns the house into a feeding maze. Here, the swamp becomes a murky stage where the monster does not need to be visible all the time. It only needs to make the water wrong.
That is why the decision to withhold the full hippo for a while helps. Bloody Disgusting notes that the film delays the first clear look at the beast until around the midpoint, using ripples and splashes before showing the animal properly. (Bloody Disgusting!) This is basic creature-feature grammar, but it still works when handled with patience. The imagination fills the water. The unseen thing becomes larger because every disturbed surface now has meaning.
The film is not reinventing anything structurally. It is not pretending to. It is doing the animal-attack pattern with a monster we are not used to seeing in that role. That is enough novelty to give the old rhythm a small jolt.
The Creature Design: Nancy Enters the Chat
The hippo works because it has physical presence. That matters. Creature features live or die on whether the threat feels like it shares space with the actors. If it looks like a digital placeholder with teeth, the film becomes a weather report for pixels.
James Nunn leaned heavily on practical effects where possible. Entertainment Weekly reported that the production used a massive practical hippo prop nicknamed Nancy, with Nunn explaining that close-up shots of the hippo head were often the practical creature. He described it as a huge animatronic creation operated by five people, with separate operators for the head, jaw, ears, tongue, and slime. (EW.com)
That is the sort of detail I enjoy, partly because it reminds me of the old pleasure of monsters as objects. Rubber, water, mechanisms, puppeteers, people just out of frame making something breathe. As a graphic designer and former art director, I am always slightly biased towards the thing that looks touched by hands. Digital work can be remarkable, and Hungry does use it, but there is a difference when an actor has a large physical head lunging at them. You can see it in the body language. People react differently to something actually occupying the room, even if the room is a fake swamp.
The bayou itself was also built. Nunn told Entertainment Weekly that the production constructed a roughly 50-metre by 50-metre “swamp tank” in a forested area in Malta, dressed to resemble the Louisiana bayou, with fibreglass trees and clean but unheated water. (EW.com) Bloody Disgusting also notes the film was shot in Malta and praises the set-dressed water tank as convincing. (Bloody Disgusting!)
That controlled artificiality gives the film a curious old-school flavour. It is not the slickest-looking horror film, but it has a practical ingenuity that suits the genre. The swamp is both real enough and obviously manufactured enough to feel like a film set in the better sense: a place designed for danger, shadows, water movement, and bodies trying not to slip.
The hippo design avoids cuteness. That is important. Hippos have been softened in popular culture by children’s books, zoo signage, cartoons, plush toys, and the general human habit of confusing roundness with kindness. Hungry strips that away. The mouth is the key image: huge, wet, blunt, almost architectural. Not fanged in the theatrical Dracula sense, but worse in some ways. It looks like a crushing mechanism.
A shark slices. A hippo seems to close.
That difference gives the attacks a nasty physical logic. The film could have used more gore, and I will get to that, but the monster itself has the right sort of weight. It does not feel elegant. It feels like a sofa with tusks and a grudge.
Characters Who Make Terrible Decisions, Because Apparently That Is the Law
Survival horror depends on bad decisions. It always has. The trick is making those decisions feel human rather than merely stupid.
In Hungry, the first bad decision is Dionne’s money changing hands. She wants something special. Something exclusive. Something beyond the official route. This is exactly how people die in these films. Nobody is ever satisfied with the normal tour, the safe path, the locked gate, the posted warning, or the person who clearly knows what they are talking about.
To be fair, horror would be much shorter if characters listened.
But the frustration is part of the genre pleasure. You sit there thinking, “Do not go into the water,” while understanding that the entire film exists because someone will absolutely go into the water. They will retrieve a locator, save a kit, rescue someone, panic, argue, climb badly, drop something, fall, or decide that now is the ideal time for an emotional collapse in a place where the water itself has teeth.
Some of the decisions in Hungry are understandable. Sistine retrieving the emergency kit and locator makes sense because rescue depends on it. Mikey helping recover the locator gives him a moment of usefulness before the film takes him away. Sally treating Rodrigo’s wound gives her professional function beyond being “the mother”. (CULTURE CRYPT)
Other choices are more maddening. Dionne’s panic and accusations contribute to Mikey falling into the water, where he is killed. Sally, shattered after losing her father and son, walks into the darkness and disappears. (CULTURE CRYPT) That second moment is less stupidity than grief overwhelming survival instinct, which is darker and more credible. Still, from the safety of the sofa, one does find oneself offering calm strategic advice to fictional people who have no interest in receiving it.
The film’s character writing is functional but not empty. That is probably the right balance for this sort of thing. I do not need an eight-part psychological profile of everyone on the boat, but I do need them to have enough shape that their deaths are not just punctuation marks. Bloody Disgusting praised the film for building suspense around engaging characters and performances rather than simply encouraging the viewer to wait for the next kill. (Bloody Disgusting!) I would not go quite that far, but I understand the point. The characters are not profound, but they are also not interchangeable.
Sistine works because she begins the film already diminished. She is not a confident action heroine waiting for permission to emerge. She is a person who thinks life keeps proving something unpleasant about her. Surviving the hippo does not magically solve that, but it gives the film a clean arc: she stops seeing herself as the person things happen to and becomes the person who acts, even when the action is absurdly dangerous.
Dionne is more interesting in fragments than as a whole. Her selfishness creates consequences, but the film keeps tugging her back toward recognisable humanity. She has stepchildren. She has fear. She has a survival instinct that keeps hardening into self-preservation. When she traps Walker, leaving him to die, it feels awful but also grimly consistent. Some people become heroic under pressure. Others become more themselves.
Walker, meanwhile, is the old genre professional. He knows things. He warns people. He has exactly the energy of a man who has been waiting all his life to be proved right by an enraged hippopotamus. Joaquim de Almeida gives him enough grit to make him enjoyable without making him too noble. His death is not surprising, but it has the required crunch of inevitability.
Hannah, Sally, Tim, Mikey, and Rodrigo are there to give the survival machine emotional steps. That sounds dismissive, but it is not meant to be entirely. In this kind of film, not every character needs a grand arc. Some are there to show what kind of story we are in. The nice friend dies. The family unit is broken. The guide suffers for crossing the line. The old hunter falls after the animal proves it is not just a target but a force.
The final girl survives.
Of course she does.
The Death Pattern and the Genre Clock
One of my issues with survival horror is that once you recognise the pattern, you can feel the genre clock ticking. Someone dies, the group recalculates, someone argues, someone tries a plan, the plan fails, someone else dies. Repeat until the film has narrowed itself down to the person whose emotional problem can be solved by not being eaten.
Hungry follows that rhythm closely. Tim dies. Hannah dies. Mikey dies. Sally disappears. Rodrigo dies. Walker dies. Dionne dies. Sistine survives. (CULTURE CRYPT) There is very little ambiguity about the body-count logic once it begins. The film does not try to outsmart the template. It tries to make the template tense enough to carry itself.
That partly works because the hippo is unusual. A shark attack film has to fight decades of shark attack films. An alligator film has to deal with our existing alligator expectations. A hippo film arrives with less baggage, unless you count the board game, which I am trying not to.
The deaths themselves are not as nasty as they could be. Bloody Disgusting points out that the film is not especially strong on gore, with many human deaths happening through attacks and bodies dragged underwater rather than elaborate visible mutilation. (Bloody Disgusting!) I felt that absence. Not because I need gore for gore’s sake, but because a film about a massive animal crushing people should probably have a little more physical consequence. The alligator carcass early on suggests a brutality the human deaths do not always match.
There is, however, a good argument that restraint helps the hippo remain believable. Real animal attacks are chaotic, fast, and often half-seen. The water hides damage. Panic edits the scene. The mind fills in what the camera withholds. Still, creature features are also about pay-off, and Hungry occasionally pulls its punches when it might have landed them harder.
The stronger moments are not always the kills. The gasoline ring, the emergency locator, the attempts to cross or disturb the water, the flare, the desperate climb, the row to the abandoned alligator farm — these moments work because they give the characters problems to solve under pressure. Survival horror gets dull when people only wait to die. It becomes more engaging when every small practical act becomes dangerous.
This is where Nunn’s background in tight action filmmaking helps. He has made lean, contained action thrillers, and Hungry benefits from that sense of bodies in constrained space. UpcomingHorrorMovies notes that Hungry was written and directed by Nunn, whose credits include Tower Block, One Shot, and Shark Bait. (UHM – UpcomingHorrorMovies) The film is at its best when it treats the swamp like an action geography: boat, tree, hull, waterline, bank, abandoned structure, trapped animal, fire, escape route.
The map is simple. The danger is not.
The Ending: Not Hungry, Just Maternal and Furious
The ending is both obvious and slightly smarter than the title suggests.
After the survivors reach the abandoned alligator farm, they discover records explaining how hippos came to the area and find a baby hippo trapped under metal fencing. (CULTURE CRYPT) The adult hippo is not just a random killer. It is protecting its calf. The rampage has not been hunger but panic, territory, maternal aggression, and humans once again wandering into a situation they have not bothered to understand.
Walker is killed. Dionne falls, breaks her leg, and is eventually killed while trying to get back to the boat. Sistine stays behind to free the trapped baby. Once she lifts the obstruction and releases the calf, the mother hippo stops attacking and leaves with it. Sistine is rescued by helicopter, and from above she sees the reunited hippos moving away through the swamp. (CULTURE CRYPT)
That ending works in outline because it reframes the monster without forgiving it. The hippo is not evil. Animals are not evil. It is not a slasher villain with a snout. It is a huge territorial mother animal in an environment where humans have created the conditions for disaster. The film does not suddenly become an ecological sermon, thankfully, but it does allow the threat to make sense.
The final image is not triumphant. Sistine survives, but the hippos are still out there. The danger remains. The rescue helicopter does not solve the larger problem. It simply removes one woman from the immediate disaster.
That is a good ending for a film like this. Not brilliant, not haunting, but clean. It gives Sistine an act of mercy that is also an act of intelligence. She survives not by killing the monster but by understanding the situation better than the others. That matters. Survival horror often ends with destruction: blow up the shark, burn the spider, impale the creature, crush the thing with machinery. Hungry instead ends by saying the way out is not conquest but release.
Of course, almost everyone is still dead.
So, you know. Mixed results.
The Music and the Sound of Something Moving Underwater
Austin Wintory scored Hungry, with Film Music Reporter noting in April 2026 that he was reuniting with James Nunn for the film. (Film Music Reporter) Wintory is an interesting name for a film like this because his career includes games and films where atmosphere, momentum, and emotional texture matter. I would not call Hungry a score-led film in the way some horror becomes inseparable from its music, but the soundscape does its job.
The important sound in Hungry is not melody. It is disturbance.
Water shifting. Something large moving beneath the surface. The sudden violence of impact. The absence of animal noise where there should be swamp life. The creak of the boat, the slap of water, the panic in voices trying to stay quiet while fear makes everyone louder.
Creature horror depends on sound as warning. A shark fin is visual grammar. A hippo gives you water displacement, breathing, force, and that terrible sense of mass approaching before the body fully appears. The film’s sound design understands that the monster is not frightening because it is fast in a sleek predator way. It is frightening because it is impossibly heavy and somehow still fast enough.
That mismatch is unnerving. The animal looks like it should not move with that speed. Then it does.
Nostalgia, but Not the Cosy Kind
There is a nostalgia to Hungry, though not because I grew up with hippo horror. I did not have a beloved childhood shelf full of rogue megaherbivore VHS tapes, though now I sort of wish I had.
The nostalgia is more structural. Hungry feels like the kind of mid-budget creature feature that might once have sat on a video-store shelf with a lurid cover and a title that did most of the work. You would rent it because the premise was clear from six feet away. People. Swamp. Hippo. Trouble.
There is something comforting about that directness. Modern streaming has given us an ocean of content that often feels oddly vague even when expensive. Hungry has no such problem. It knows exactly what it is selling. There is almost a physical-media bluntness to it, a sense that the poster and the premise are in honest conversation.
That does not make it great. It makes it legible.
The film also belongs to a long animal-attack lineage, and it knows it. Bloody Disgusting places it among bayou danger films and creature features, while noting that the unusual hippo threat helps it stand apart from more familiar shark and swamp-horror patterns. (Bloody Disgusting!) The pleasure here is not originality in the grand sense. It is variation. The same song, played with a stranger instrument.
As a Gen X viewer, I have a soft spot for that. Not blind affection, but recognition. I remember when a film could get your attention with a monster, a location, and a slightly silly title. You did not need a cinematic universe, a lore bible, or a post-credit hint that another hippo was forming a team.
You just needed people to get on the wrong boat.
What Worked
The hippo worked.
That is the main thing. If the creature had failed, the whole film would have collapsed into accidental comedy. But the combination of practical effects, digital support, smart withholding, and sheer physical concept gives Hungry a stronger monster than I expected. The animatronic work matters. Nancy matters. The mouth matters.
The setting worked too. The bayou tank in Malta could have looked cheap or sterile, but it has enough atmosphere to sell the danger. The water is never just water. It is a surface hiding intent.
Sistine works as a final girl because her survival is not built on sudden invincibility. She is scared, uncertain, and emotionally worn down, but she pays attention. Madison Davenport gives her enough vulnerability to make the final choice land. Freeing the calf is not a superhero moment. It is a desperate act by someone who has finally understood the problem.
Dionne is useful because she gives the film a human irritant. Survival horror needs external danger, but it also needs people making the situation worse. Tracey Bonner keeps her just human enough that she does not become a cartoon of selfishness, though the film absolutely knows what shelf she belongs on.
Walker gives the film its old-school creature-feature flavour. Joaquim de Almeida brings the right sort of weathered authority, the kind that makes you think he has probably been wrong about many things in life but is unfortunately correct about hippos.
And the ending, while predictable in its final-girl shape, at least has a thematic hinge. The hippo is not hungry. The hippo is protecting its young. The humans are the intrusion. That does not make the deaths less horrible, but it does make the title feel less literal and more like a small misdirection.
What Did Not Work
The film is still predictable.
That is not automatically fatal, but it limits the tension. Once the group is stranded, you can feel the order of operations forming. The deaths arrive with the familiar genre rhythm. Some viewers find comfort in that. I partly do. But there were moments where I wanted the film to wrong-foot me more.
The human decision-making occasionally crosses from believable panic into the usual survival-horror stupidity. I know that is part of the bargain. I know frightened people make bad choices. Still, there are only so many times one can watch someone make the swamp a worse place to be and not start quietly judging them from the sofa.
The gore is also lighter than the premise suggests. A hippo attack should feel catastrophic. The film has violence, but some of the deaths are softened by darkness, water, and offscreen implication. That may have been budget, taste, rating strategy, or simply Nunn’s preferred approach, but I wanted a bit more consequence. If the film is going to show us what happened to Big Ben, it should probably let the human danger feel just as physically awful.
Some characters remain archetypes rather than people. Again, creature features can survive that, but Hungry occasionally gestures towards emotional depth without fully earning it. Sally’s grief is affecting in concept, but the film moves quickly. Hannah’s death matters because of Sistine, but Hannah herself could have used more texture. Rodrigo’s competence and compromise are useful, but he is still mostly a function.
And the title remains awkward. Memorable, yes. Marketable, yes. But it points towards a joke the film is not really telling and a feeding motive the story eventually complicates. Maybe that is the point. Maybe Territorial was never going to look good on a poster.
Why It Still Matters, in Its Small, Snapping Way
I would not overstate Hungry’s cultural relevance. This is not a landmark horror film. It is not going to redraw the map. It is not secretly about the collapse of civilisation, unless one is feeling very generous and has had too much coffee.
But it does say something about the current creature-feature appetite. We have seen so many sharks, crocodiles, bears, snakes, and genetically annoyed animals that novelty now comes from changing the species and taking the change seriously. GamesRadar noted the escalation from apes and anacondas to hippos when the film’s first look appeared, positioning the animal as a surprisingly deadly but underused threat in horror. (GamesRadar+)
That is where Hungry earns its place. It gives the hippo its horror due.
It also quietly pushes against the way popular culture infantilises certain animals. Hippos look funny to us because they are round, because their ears are small, because cartoon logic has trained us badly. Hungry removes the cartoon. It reminds us that cute is often just danger viewed from a safe distance.
The film is not deep, but it is smarter than its title. It understands that the fear is not being eaten by a hungry animal. The fear is realising that you have entered a world where your human assumptions are useless. The swamp does not care about your job loss, your business call, your family holiday, your camera, your emergency plan, or your belief that the tour guide probably knows what he is doing.
The swamp has a hippo in it.
That is the whole argument, really.
The Final Girl and the View From Above
By the end, Sistine is rescued, everyone else is gone, and the hippos move away together through the swamp. It is a strangely calm image after so much panic. Not peaceful exactly. More like the film finally taking its own animal seriously.
The humans thought they were in an adventure. Then they thought they were in a monster movie. Sistine survives because she realises, late but not too late, that she is in an animal’s crisis.
That does not make Hungry profound. It makes it a decent little survival thriller with one excellent choice of monster, some sturdy suspense, some frustrating decisions, a better-than-expected creature, and an ending that knows the difference between killing the threat and understanding it.
I went in for the hippo joke.
I came out thinking the joke was mostly on us.
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