{Movie Review} Hungry (2026)

There are two movies you could make about a killer hippo loose in the Louisiana bayou. One of them is a cynical paycheck production, shot on a soundstage somewhere with CGI that looks like a screensaver, populated by characters you’ll forget before the credits roll. The other one is somehow, against all odds, a legitimately well-crafted piece of genre filmmaking that has no business looking as good as it does. James Nunn’s Hungry is the second movie. Mostly.

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Here’s the thing about Hungry: it knows exactly what it is. A group of thrill-seeking tourists board a riverboat tour through the treacherous Louisiana swamplands (someone says “gonna see some gators” so many times it becomes an accidental drinking game), get lured off the beaten path by the promise of an exclusive adventure, and end up in a fight for their lives against a very large, very ravenous hippopotamus lurking beneath the bayou’s murky waters. That’s the whole engine. Nunn, who made a name for himself with the One Shot trilogy and Wildcat, is not here to reinvent the natural disaster thriller. He’s here to execute one, and more often than not, he does exactly that.

What’s disarming about Hungry is how good it looks. The cinematography is sharper than anything in this lane has any right to be. New Orleans (or its stand ins I am not sure) and its surrounding swamplands are gorgeous and genuinely ominous in equal measure, and the production leans into that instead of papering over it with obvious artifice. If you’ve spent time in that part of the world, there’s an atmospheric authenticity here that most killer animal movies never bother to chase. The bayou feels real, which makes the threat feel just plausible enough to work. OK maybe not exactly real but real enough. Any artifice that exists feels fun and just a tiny bit campy.

The early set pieces are where Hungry earns its keep. Working within what are clearly tight physical constraints, Nunn makes the confined, daylit spaces feel genuinely menacing. The best sequences in the film’s first half have a real economy to them, building spatial tension from small environments the way a good stage production turns limitations into atmosphere. You can feel the crew making smart choices, squeezing maximum dread out of minimum square footage. It’s the kind of craft that genre fans notice and general audiences absorb without knowing why they’re on the edge of their seat. There is clear talent behind the camera. That is obvious.

The cast is doing what you’d expect. Madison Davenport, probably best known from Sharp Objects, holds the center adequately. Joaquim de Almeida, a reliable character actor presence from Road House to Fast X, plays the kind of vaguely accented boat captain that is, apparently, a load-bearing requirement of the form. Think the Anaconda DNA running through the whole enterprise, a memorable if silly band of swamp tourists whose dialogue is functional at best and wooden at worst. That’s not a dealbreaker here. It is just the genre working as advertised for a killer hippo movie.

Because Hungry isn’t selling you on its screenplay. It’s selling you on its creature, and the practical hippo effects deliver. Particularly the mouth work near the end of the film, where up-close creature design generates genuine unease. There’s a tactile quality to the hippo in its best moments that makes you believe the production budget went somewhere useful. The creature feels like a real thing in the water with the actors, and that matters enormously in a movie that lives or dies by whether you believe in its monster.

Where Hungry loses some of the goodwill it worked hard to earn is in its lighting choices, and then again in its pacing. The transition into the second act brings a murky, underexposed night photography that can make individual sequences genuinely difficult to parse. It’s the kind of dark where you’re squinting at your screen trying to figure out which part of which creature is doing something to which part of which person. A movie that spent its first half showing off how well it uses physical space starts obscuring that space entirely, which is a frustrating trade. The back half compounds this with a slowdown in momentum that the film never quite recovers from. The final stretch still gets where it needs to go, but it coasts a little when it should be accelerating.

Still, Hungry is a better movie than the premise suggests and a more competent one than the genre usually delivers. It’s Anaconda in the bayou (the film doesn’t not know this about itself), and it earns its spot in that lineage with visual craft, smart low-budget staging, and practical effects that pay off when it counts. The dialogue might make you wince. The darkness will make you squint. The hippo will make you flinch. Can’t have everything but if you are hungry for a hippo you could do much worse.

Hungry arrives on VOD June 23, 2026. See it in theatres today.