Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and Directed by James Nunn
Hungry (2026) presents a rampaging hippopotamus that wrecks an alligator-touring flatboat group in the Louisiana bayou. The film paddles through familiar territory, but swaps out the traditional crocodilian menace for a legitimately dangerous mega-mammal. Capable and earnest performances and impressive visuals bolster what would otherwise be a by-the-numbers production.
We have a new species entrant into the “when animals attack” horror trope. The hippopotamus. These giant vegetarians look clumsy or even cute. The world fell in love with Moo Deng, the pymy hippo in the Bangkok Zoo last year. In 2017, the Cincinnati Zoo lit up social media with the arrival of Fiona, the baby hippopotamus who they nursed back to health. Add in the popular plastic game “Hungry Hungry Hippos” (clearly the inspiration for the title of this movie), and you have an unlikely monster.
This movie, however, wisely and correctly asserts that an estimated 500 to 800 human deaths each year are attributed to hippos. Bears account for 4-6 fatalities per year in North America. Sharks have a ways to go to match that grisly statistic. Global shark deaths are about 6-10 per year. Crocodilians give hippos a run for the trophy with 275-745 fatalities a year, but you get the point.
The point is: Hippos are dangerous. Just look at em:
OK. Maybe those weren’t the best examples. Awwww!
“The Only Cute Hippo is a Dead Hippo.”
Walker, correcting his guests.
But think of it this way. Bear cubs are cute. Tiger cubs are adorable. However, you don’t want to mess with the parents, do you? Remember, finding a lion cub in the wild is a quick sentence to getting mauled.
I applaud James Nunn for tackling this task. He successfully made a hippopotamus menacing. In order to do so, he put his animal into a proven template: the touring trip gone bad. Prominent examples include Black Water, Rogue, 47 Meters Down, The Reef, Cocaine Bear, Beast, and the movie that Hungry most closely resembles: last year’s coked-up alligator movie The Bayou. The movie also mimics the slasher film Hatchet, since it follows a gator tour that goes seriously wrong.
The outline has familiar beats. The mixed bag of tourists looking for a bit of adventure. The tour operator who wants to impress the guests to get a little extra tip. The trip goes past the typical route, and that’s when mayhem strikes. The swamp is impassable, and the group takes to whatever high ground they can reach, but with part of the group badly injured, an hourglass with diminishing sand is at play. Fortunately, the cast is full of likable characters, with one notable heel. Every wilderness survival horror needs one instigator or troublemaker within the group.
The Cast of Hungry:
- Madison Davenport plays Sistine, a young woman on vacation in New Orleans who is struggling with her career and self-doubt.
- Olivia Bernstone plays Hannah, Sistine’s best friend. The sassy Hannah brims with confidence and encourages Sistine to relax and believe in herself.
- Tracey Bonner plays Dionne, a recently divorced businesswoman trying to regain custody of her stepsons. She gives the captain a generous tip to make sure they see a big alligator.
- Michel Curiel is Rodrigo, the swamp boat captain and tour guide.
- Joaquim de Almeida plays Walker, a big game hunter and owner of “Gator Joe’s” alligator tours.
- Samantha Coughlan is Sally, a nurse who is traveling with her father and son on the Gator Joe tour.
- Jim Meskimen plays Tim, Sally’s dad, and a former firefighter. He’s calm under pressure.
- River Codack plays Mike, Sally’s teenage son who takes an immediate shine to Sistine and Hannah.
A Synopsis of Hungry:
Sistine and Hannah are celebrating a vacation in a bar in New Orleans when Sistine receives a call from her boss. Her vacation turns sour immediately when she is fired over the phone, seemingly for taking it. Hannah, meanwhile, has booked a gator boat tour for the morning, and the two of them resolve that it will be a fine distraction from Sistine’s recent bad news. The captain, Rodrigo, meets the hungover duo the next morning, along with the rest of the tourists who signed up for the swamp cruise. Sally, Tim, and Mikey are there on a family getaway, and Donna is taking a break from a business trip in the Big Easy.
When the group arrives at the boat dock, the tourists step into the adjacent shop and curio museum, where the owner, Walker, gives them all the necessary exposition on a hippo skull on display. Hippos are highly aggressive and territorial animals, particularly when guarding their young. Not to worry, though; the hippos are long gone. (Right?) All you have to worry about is the alligators. Keep your hands inside the boat, and you’ll be OK.
Rodrigo launches the boat, and the tour begins. Plenty of alligators, raccoons, and other fauna are spotted, along with other tour boats. But Rodrigo has a tracker on the biggest gator in the region. Big Ben. His tracking collar locates him outside of the normal tour route, so they advance further into the swamp. When they arrive at the beacon source, what they find is a decimated alligator. It is Big Ben, and he’s in several pieces on the shore. This spooks everyone, and as they turn around to get back to home base, something big slams into the boat, flipping it.
Everyone scrambles to get out of the water, and something drags Rodrigo underwater. While the party climbs into the mangroves, they pull the badly mauled captain from the water. Of course, there is no cell service. They are off the prescribed route. Limited food. Only a few bottles of water. To make matters worse, an angry hippo patrols the water around them. A long and dangerous night awaits.
Evaluation of Hungry
This was a movie I had promoted as one I was most looking forward to in 2026. Did it impress me? It delivered what I expected, and maybe a little more. The concept was something I really wanted. A hippo horror movie. Fortunately, they played it straight and didn’t go for a mockbuster, which was certainly in the realm of possibilities. The movie did not have much marketing behind it, and since it is a British film, which has been cranking out some truly awful mockbusters, it could have ended up cringey. I enjoyed this movie. But then again, I am a sucker for nature’s revenge films.
The hippo is extremely convincing and menacing. They mixed CGI and practical effects, and it looks like a real hippopotamus. As Spielberg did with Jaws, Nunn used the hippo sparingly. Was this done to preserve the budget? Probably. Would I like to have seen more of it? Yes. But if that meant that, as a result, the animal looked as impressive as it did, I’ll take it. Fortunately, we all know what a hippo looks like. The movie needs to convince us that what we are seeing truly is a hippo. If I were to have a nitpick with this movie: when running from a hippo, you could probably just climb a staircase or go up to the roof and be plenty safe. Hippos = not good climbers.
The acting was solid, if not spectacular. Sometimes the script would force in some exposition (like the museum scene), but all the characters acted in line with the situation. The script cast Dionne as a Karen-like, demanding antagonist who drove many of the misfortunes. She was a necessary almost-evil. The rest of the group were largely nice folks caught in a terrible situation. Clearly Sistine was set up to be the final girl from the opening scene. The remaining question: how many of the rest of them are going to make it out at the end?
A Bit of History (And why I find this story so fascinating):
In 1910, Louisiana Senator Robert Broussard, along with former President Teddy Roosevelt, proposed introducing hippos into the Louisiana bayou. They would provide an alternative meat supply during a national beef shortage and control the invasive water hyacinth, which was choking the Mississippi delta and the Florida panhandle. Broussard announced that hippopotamuses could be easily domesticated, and their meat would taste like pork. Neither of these assertions was backed with any facts, but such is politics. Before Broussard could execute this legislation, he died in office. So, no hippos for the U.S.A.
Writer Sarah Gailey wrote a pair of novellas, River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow, as a counterfactual What If? If this subject matter is as interesting to you as it was to me, then you can get her compiled novel, American Hippo. I wonder if Nunn was influenced by these novels when he wrote his screenplay.
To get a better understanding of what MIGHT have happened, one needs only to look to Colombia, where Medellin cocaine dealer Pablo Escobar introduced these animals into the Magdalena River as pets. Now, there are 80 hippos in the river, and they are drastically changing the river ecosystem. The locals are struggling to determine what to do with these biological bulldozers. They are charismatic and reconnecting waterways that were previously isolated, but they are dangerous animals. Plus, they don’t really belong there. It’s complicated.
Concluding thoughts
As noted before, I really wanted this movie to be great. It strongly resembles so many other movies, however, that it feels like I’ve seen this movie before. So, that’s a bit of a bummer. The familiar recipe: Cut a little from Hatchet, borrow a little more from Rogue, and add an element from The Bayou. Voila! Hungry! Granted, those are good models to work from. Feel free to borrow from quality precedent films. Though not gory, this movie also thrills. This is an entertaining nature survival story, with just enough realism to be believable. If you like man-vs.-nature films, it’s worth a watch. I guarantee you will remember this film, though, as I doubt there will be a run on hippo horror any time soon.
On a personal level, I’ve been on a safari where hippos grazed grass outside of my tent at night. They make some pretty crazy noises. Had I seen this movie, it would have changed my perception of those beasties. By day, I would watch them in their dozens from a viewing platform at my camp. When the bulls would joust, it was a sight to behold. Those are big, powerful animals, and our guides gave us plenty of warnings about keeping our distance.
The PG-13 rating nerfs the potential savagery. I’m not sure that I needed a really gory hippo horror movie, though. Watching the animal explode into action was pretty jarring and was plenty exciting. There were a couple of moments, though, that could have been pretty amazing if they allowed for some R-rated crushing action. Hungry is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube.
Review by Eric Li
The Trailer:
It’s an exciting trailer, but it does contain spoilers. Be forewarned.
