Hungry (2026) turns bayou terror into practical craft

Hungry (2026) – James Nunn’s Hungry mostly escapes the CGI paycheck trap. It’s a familiar killer-animal setup—thrill-seeking tourists, an off-path “exclusive adventure,” and a ferocious hippo under the Louisiana bayou—yet it looks unusually sharp, stages tension with smart ph

Two movies you could make about a killer hippo loose in the Louisiana bayou. One is a cynical paycheck production—soundstage energy. CGI that looks like a screensaver. characters you forget before the credits roll. The other is exactly the sort of genre swing that feels like it shouldn’t work as well as it does.

James Nunn’s Hungry lands in the second camp. Mostly.

The premise is the whole engine, and it doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise. A group of thrill-seeking tourists board a riverboat tour through Louisiana’s treacherous swamplands. They keep hearing the same promise—“gonna see some gators”—until it turns into an accidental drinking game. Then the boat excursion veers off the beaten path toward an “exclusive adventure. ” and the group ends up fighting for their lives against a very large. very ravenous hippopotamus lurking beneath the bayou’s murky waters.

Nunn isn’t trying to reinvent the natural disaster thriller. He’s trying to execute it. You can feel that intent in the way the film builds dread out of what it actually has—spaces that are confined. scenes that can’t sprawl. and a monster that has to look and move convincingly enough to justify the fear.

That’s where Hungry surprises most. The cinematography is sharper than this lane has any right to be. New Orleans—or what the film uses as stand-ins. if that’s what it is—is photographed with an atmospheric authenticity that never seems interested in covering its seams. The swamplands are gorgeous and genuinely ominous. and the movie leans into that mood instead of sandblasting it into something slick and generic.

The early set pieces are the film’s best argument for why it succeeds. Working within tight physical constraints. Nunn makes the confined. daylit spaces feel menacing in a way that doesn’t depend on constant spectacle. The first half finds tension in small environments, squeezing dread out of limited square footage. It plays like a craft decision: make the audience claustrophobic first. then let the threat feel plausible enough to do the rest.

That sense of control matters, because Hungry isn’t selling you on its screenplay. It’s selling you on its creature. And in that area, the practical hippo effects do real work—especially near the end of the film. When the camera gets up close, the mouth work generates genuine unease. There’s a tactile quality to the hippo in its best moments. the kind of detail that only pays off when the production budget actually went somewhere useful. The creature feels like a real thing in the water with the actors. and for a movie that lives or dies by whether you believe in its monster. that is the difference between “watchable” and “flinching.”.

The cast, meanwhile, is mostly what the genre demands. Madison Davenport, probably best known from Sharp Objects, holds the center adequately. Joaquim de Almeida—familiar as a character actor presence from Road House to Fast X—plays a vaguely accented boat captain that seems to be. in this film’s universe. a load-bearing requirement of the form. There’s also a memorable if silly band of swamp tourists whose dialogue is functional at best and wooden at worst. That won’t break the deal. but it does shape how the movie feels: it’s action and atmosphere first. writing second.

If Hungry earns its goodwill early, it starts spending it later—through lighting and pacing. The transition into the second act shifts into murky, underexposed night photography, and it doesn’t flatter the action. Individual sequences become 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. The film that spent its opening moments showing off how well it uses physical space starts obscuring that space entirely. and the trade is frustrating.

The back half compounds the problem with a slowdown in momentum that the film never quite recovers from. The final stretch does still reach where it needs to go, but it coasts a little when it should be accelerating.

Taken together, Hungry lands as a better movie than the premise suggests and more competent than the genre usually delivers. It’s Anaconda in the bayou, and the film doesn’t seem unaware of that lineage. What it brings to that tradition is visual craft. smart low-budget staging. and practical effects that pay off when the hippo matters most.

The dialogue might make you wince. The darkness will make you squint. The hippo will make you flinch. If you’re hungry for a hippo movie, you could do much worse.

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

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