Director: Dan Trachtenberg Screenplay: Patrick Aison Cast: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Michelle Thrush, Stormee Kipp, Julian Black Antelope, Dane DiLiegro Year: 2022
The Predator franchise had spent years missing. After a run of films that didn't deliver what they promised, and a long stretch with nothing new about the creature at all, "Prey" turned up almost quietly and cleared every expectation. What's interesting is that it doesn't do it by remaking anything. It isn't a remake or a continuation: it's a completely different look at a character we thought was exhausted, and it works precisely because it changes the question. Instead of asking how to defeat the predator, it asks what hunting one would actually mean.
In "Prey" we follow Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman who wants to be recognised as a hunter. In her tribe hunting isn't forbidden to women, but it does tilt toward the men, and Naru has spent a long time trying to prove she belongs there without managing it. Meanwhile a creature arrives in the region and begins a hunt of its own. Naru is the first to notice something is out there, and the first to understand that it's far more dangerous than anything they have ever hunted.
The sub-genre is survival horror against a superior predator, and the closest references in this catalog are "The Descent" (2005), where a group of women is trapped in the terrain that favours the creature, and "Crawl" (2019), which also understands that an animal more efficient than you doesn't get beaten head-on. The difference here is the technological gap. The predator isn't merely stronger and faster: it comes from somewhere else and carries tools the Comanche have no way to anticipate, and the film builds that asymmetry patiently.
The best decision "Prey" makes is spending a good part of its runtime showing how effective the creature is before putting it in front of Naru. We watch it hunt animals larger than itself, in greater numbers, and do it with an ease that lands. It isn't a monster that shows up to kill humans: it's a hunter working, and the film makes us assess it as one. By the time the tribe's disadvantage is clear, the tension no longer depends on any scare, it depends on arithmetic.
And that's where Naru works as a character. Cinema usually builds the hunter out of strength and the absence of fear, and Naru has neither. What she has is a mind: she observes, plans, tests, corrects. The film takes the time to plant each of those capacities in small moments, so that when the confrontation arrives nothing feels handed to her. You believe she can win, because you watched her learn.
There's also a production decision worth acknowledging: much of the cast is of Native American descent, and the tribe's language is used across several stretches. It isn't set dressing. It gives the film a texture the genre rarely bothers to look for.
Where "Prey" loses points is the digital effects. The film leans on them heavily, which is understandable because there's no other way to get what it needs, but the quality doesn't always keep up and in several moments it shows badly. And there are a couple of scenes where the film flinches: it sets up the violence and then covers exactly what it should be showing. I don't know whether the call was to avoid being too graphic or whether it was a way to hide the limits of the effects. I suspect the latter, and in a film that is otherwise fairly frontal about violence, that selective modesty stands out.
Anyone left disappointed by the franchise's recent attempts will find the best version of this creature in decades. Anyone demanding about digital effects will hit the same wall I did. To me "Prey" sits level with the 1987 Predator in terms of pure enjoyment. The original keeps more credit, because it brought a new concept and an execution you could argue was ahead of its time, but this one takes a familiar character, looks at him from another angle, and revives him.
Rating: 9/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
Naru goes after the creature accompanied by other members of the tribe, and the film doesn't grant her company for long: none of them survive. Among those losses is her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), who dies at the predator's hands after spending the whole film as the hunter the tribe did recognise.
What holds the ending together is what Naru accumulates across each encounter. She doesn't gain strength or find a better weapon: she learns how the creature operates. She works out what it detects and what it doesn't, where the limits of that seemingly absolute technology sit, and turns every observation into something usable. The film had spent two acts teaching us to assess the predator as a hunter, and in the third it hands that same assessment to Naru.
The final confrontation resolves on exactly that. Naru doesn't win on power but on design: she uses what she learned, combines it with the way of hunting she had spent the entire film trying to validate, and kills the creature.
The closing image is what gives all of it weight. Naru returns to the tribe carrying the predator's head, and that gesture does two things at once. It avenges Taabe and the others who died, and it proves in the least arguable way available that she is a hunter. There is no better evidence on offer: the creature had been killing animals far larger than itself and had gone through the group's best hunters. Naru beat it without being either of those things.
It's a direct ending, no turns and no ambiguity, and it doesn't need any. The message is in the method: the film spent two hours arguing that intelligence is a form of strength, and the last shot is simply that argument coming due.
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