Blooded Review

Touching The Void meets the Countryside Alliance in this tense, faux-docudrama, which follows a group of friends whose stag-shooting outdoor adventure goes awry when animal rights activists decide to make the hunters the hunted. Told through interviews, reconstruction and ‘real’ footage, it expertly executes the format shifts and presents the remote landscape as both picture-postcard beautiful and very frightening. The drawback to the retrospective storytelling is a sense of inevitability to events, which slows your interest despite some eventual surprises. Some flat performances also harm its heart, though Adam Best is superb as the regretful best friend of the noble/fanatical huntsman played by Nick Ashdon, whose enigmatic presence ultimately powers this unsettling look at the nature of extremism.