Hy3na

Hy3na is a stylish, nasty, and surprisingly thoughtful independent Canadian exploitation thriller, but it certainly knows how to entertain with biting dialogue and brutal violence that is practical and tastefully handled without being over the top.  What immediately distinguishes the film is the confidence of its visual presentation.

The story follows Nicole and Rachel, two women whose connection to a violent car crash places them in the sights of detectives investigating a series of murders. Much of the film unfolds through interrogation, with the past gradually revealed through competing accounts and flashbacks. Who is telling the truth? Who is manipulating whom? And how much of what we are being shown is actually what happened?

Edgar Poe asked, “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” It is an especially fitting question for the picture, as it is a film in which memory, desire, and deception continually bleed into one another. As Nicole sits beneath the cold scrutiny of a police interrogation, the past unfolds like fragments of a fever dream: neon lights, seductive encounters, violence, and shifting identities, until it becomes increasingly difficult to know whether we are watching the truth, someone’s version of it, or simply another layer of the story being performed for us.

Nicole (Kristen Kaster) grins with blood smeared on her face in Hy3na.

“The story follows Nicole and Rachel, two women whose connection to a violent car crash places them in the sights of detectives investigating a series of murders.”

This is an unusually good-looking independent production, with a vivid colour palette almost comic and an almost pop-art sensibility that gives the film a personality of its own. I am familiar with the work of   Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ graphic novel series Criminal and others, which shows in the colour palette and neon. That sense of artificiality becomes important because Hy3na is ultimately interested in the difference between what people appear to be and what they actually are

Visually, Hy3na occasionally recalls the neon-soaked crime films of Hong Kong, where colour, signage and night-time streets become almost as important as the characters themselves.  To Live and Die in LA is also similar in pleasure in the artificiality of the imagery: glowing shop fronts, saturated neon, dark interiors punctuated by vivid colour and locations that seem to exist somewhere between the real world and a heightened cinematic one. The result can feel almost like candy-floss pop art colliding with sleazy late-night crime cinema, with pulsing music tracks and club sequences. Even a wonderfully disreputable piece of signage such as “Another Shitty Diner” contributes to that atmosphere. It is a world that looks colourful and inviting on the surface while becoming increasingly sinister underneath.

The title Hy3na is more than an attention-grabbing piece of stylization. The hyena is a scavenger and opportunist, an animal that survives by reading its environment and exploiting weakness, like many of the characters in the film.  The use of the number in the title brings to mind M3GAN or others involving an artificial world.