TL;DR: Hellcat is a low-budget horror movie that gets a surprising amount out of one cramped camper, two main performances, and a mystery that keeps changing shape - it gets a little too chatty and could use a sharper edit, but Dakota Gorman is excellent, and there is enough going on here to make it worth a watch.
Hellcat Keeps Things Small and Uncomfortable
Hellcat wastes very little time putting its main character in a thoroughly miserable situation, and then it spends most of the movie making that situation worse, where Lena, played by Dakota Gorman, is stuck inside a moving camper, injured, confused and completely dependent on a man she can't even properly see, while Clive, played by Todd Terry, is on the other end of an intercom, calmly explaining what is happening and why he is doing what he is doing.
The problem is that Clive sounds far too reasonable, and that's where the movie gets a lot of its mileage, because he isn't some guy screaming threats and shouting, as he speaks calmly, gives Lena explanations, tries to reassure her, and insists that everything he's doing is necessary, which would be lovely, except he's also the guy keeping her locked inside a moving camper.
Of course Lena can't simply trust him, but she also can't completely dismiss what he's telling her because there are things happening to her that she can't explain herself, which just makes the situation even more uncomfortable, and thankfully, Lena doesn't just sit around waiting for the story to happen to her.
She fights back, investigates, gets angry, makes mistakes and keeps trying to work out what is going on, with a real sense of frustration running through her character, and I found myself getting increasingly wound up along with her - being trapped in a small camper is bad enough, being trapped in one while somebody tells you that you might be infected with something horrible is considerably worse.
I'd probably start kicking the walls after about ten minutes.
Dakota Gorman Carries the Movie
This is a demanding role Dakota Gorman had to carry, because so much of the movie rests on her, as there aren't endless characters coming in and out to give her somebody new to play off, so a lot of the time, she's alone in the camper, reacting to Clive's voice and trying to make sense of what she's experiencing.
That could have become repetitive very quickly, but it doesn't, mainly because Gorman gives Lena enough personality to make even the quieter moments interesting - there's anger, suspicion, confusion, desperation and plenty of moments where you can see her trying to decide whether she should believe what she's being told.
I also liked that she doesn't play Lena as some perfectly capable horror heroine who suddenly knows exactly what to do because the script needs her to, she behaves like a human being who has been dumped into an absolutely ridiculous nightmare.
The film was also Gorman's chance to spend an unusually large amount of time carrying a feature, and she handles it, and she has to make a relatively small physical space feel different depending on what Lena is thinking and feeling, which isn't exactly the easiest job for an actor.
When Lena is angry, the camper feels like a prison, when she's trying to understand something, it becomes a puzzle, and when she starts realizing that something much worse may be happening, the same little space suddenly feels threatening.
That's good acting, really, as the set isn't changing much, but the character's relationship with it is.
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Todd Terry Makes Clive Hard to Figure Out
Todd Terry has a different problem, because for much of the movie, Clive is essentially a voice, which sounds like a terrible role on paper, but Terry gets quite a lot out of it, and his calm delivery makes Clive more difficult to understand because there isn't an obvious sign telling us whether he is lying - there were times when I disliked Clive intensely, then found myself wondering whether he might actually have a point.
Terry also has to deal with the fact that the movie eventually gives us more of Clive as a person, which changes how we see him, and Terry manages that transition pretty well, and I particularly liked the contrast between Clive's voice and the strange way he communicates with Lena, as there is something oddly unsettling about hearing him speak through the camper's intercom, especially when the voice comes through a mounted fox head, yes, a fox head.
It's such a bizarre little detail that it should probably be funny, but somehow it makes the whole thing creepier.
The Mystery Keeps Changing the Movie
Hellcat starts in fairly familiar territory, where Lena is trapped, Clive is mysterious, and the question is whether this is an abduction situation or something more complicated, before the strange stuff starts creeping in.
I wouldn't say the twists are completely impossible to figure out, as horror has been playing with infection, transformation and unreliable information for a very long time, so if you've watched enough of these movies, you're probably going to start making guesses, but the important thing is that the movie doesn't depend entirely on one huge surprise, because it keeps adding information that changes how earlier scenes feel.
And finally, when Hellcat does lets the horror side of the story loose, it doesn't completely chicken out, so we get some nasty moments here, particularly once the physical changes become harder to ignore, and the transformation material is one of the places where the film reminds you that this isn't simply a mystery about a woman being held prisoners.
The Movie Does Drag
Unfortunately, Hellcat isn't quite as tight as it needs to be, and the funny thing is that the movie is only around an hour and a half, yet there were stretches where I was very aware of the running time - there are conversations that go on far too long, there are moments where characters explain things that probably didn't need explaining, and there are sequences that feel as though the movie is buying time rather than actually moving forward.
The biggest problem is the dialogue though, as while some of it is good when it develops the relationship between Lena and Clive, other parts wander into philosophical territory and start sounding like the characters have suddenly enrolled in a night class on the meaning of life.
A tighter edit would have helped enormously, because where are parts of Hellcat that feel like they could lose several minutes without anybody noticing, and that's my biggest criticism here, because the film works best when the horror of the situation does all the talking, because the best parts are the ones where Lena is dealing with something she doesn't understand, Clive is saying something she doesn't trust, and the movie leaves the uncomfortable gap between those two things.
The film doesn't need to tell me how complicated everything is, it just needs to show me Lena trying to figure out whether she can trust the person holding her captive, and once the physical horror starts taking over, it has another advantage because the story finally has something nasty to go with all that uncertainty.
Final Thoughts
Hellcat is a scrappy little horror movie with a very good lead performance, a creepy central idea and enough nasty surprises to make the trip worthwhile, even though it does drag at times,m, but it has teeth, and sometimes that's enough for a one time watch.