Hungry (2026) Review

Hippos have suffered from terrible PR. Years of cartoons, bath toys, board games, zoo gift shops and (if you’re old enough to remember) Fantasia have trained us to see them as rotund, comic creatures with wiggling ears and excellent comedy timing. But Hungry seems to want to correct the record. James Nunn’s latest creature feature arrives with one very simple message: a hippopotamus is, in fact, an enormous semi-aquatic tank with teeth. It may sound silly at first, but Nunn is smart enough not to treat the animal itself as a joke.

Sistine (Madison Davenport), carrying the weight of a sick mother and recent job loss, heads into the Louisiana bayou with her friend Hannah (Olivia Bernstone) for an alligator tour. They are joined by a small collection of fellow travellers, among them nurse Sally, her teenage son Mikey, retired firefighter Tim and the impeccably dressed Dionne, who looks as though she has taken a wrong turn on the way to a corporate lunch.

The boat sets off and things go wrong almost immediately. A local alligator – famous for his size – is discovered in a state suggesting something much bigger has been chewing on it, the boat overturns and the passengers are left clinging to trees and the upturned hull while something large moves beneath the water. Nunn delays the full reveal, relying instead on ripples, sudden splashes and the uncomfortable knowledge that whatever is down there can move nearly unseen, considerably faster than anyone above it. And that patience pays off.

When the hippo finally breaks cover, it looks terrific. The blend of practical and digital effects gives the animal a terrifying sense of weight, especially around the head and mouth, where a slight twitch of the ears can somehow make the whole thing feel more threatening. Gone are the days of thinking those things are cute! This isn’t a weightless CGI blob charging through a frame, the hippo completely seems to occupy the same space as the actors.

Nunn has form with this sort of thing, having previously dipped into animal attack territory with Shark Bait, and Hungry feels like a filmmaker returning to the same playground with better toys. The action is clearer, the effects more convincing and the characters are, mercifully, people rather than disposable meat parcels.

Davenport is key to that. Sistine begins the film emotionally exhausted rather than obviously heroic, but that gives her progression weight. She never stops looking frightened, even when she becomes the person most willing to crawl under the boat, retrieve equipment or draw the animal away. Competence here is not the absence of fear, it’s doing the horrible thing anyway.

Tracey Bonner has the showier role as Dionne, a character almost scientifically designed to test the audience’s tolerances. Pushy, selfish and spectacularly ill-suited to swamp survival, she could easily become a cartoon. But Bonner keeps just enough desperation underneath the abrasiveness to make her more interesting than that.

Joaquim de Almeida, so often cinema’s go-to man for smooth-talking villains and assorted, is a welcome presence as Walker. It’s rather nice, for once, to see him batting for the right team.

The setting does a lot of work. Job Reineke’s photography turns the bayou into a maze of black water, twisted branches and uncertain depth, while the largely contained location gives the film a tight, slightly theatrical pressure.

Not everything bites quite as hard as it might. For a film about people being attacked by a hippopotamus, some kills feel a little restrained, often disappearing below the surface before things become especially messy. This is no doubt because Nunn is going for realism over sensationalism, but it does leave the viewer with more visualising to do. The final confrontation also feels a little smaller than the build-up promises.

But importantly, Hungry understands the basic contract of a creature feature. Give us people worth caring about, somewhere dangerous to trap them and an animal we would very much prefer not to meet in person. Nunn adds a surprisingly thoughtful note about captivity and maternal instinct without forgetting that the main attraction is still a furious hippo smashing its way through the bayou.

Hungry has a funny premise, serious threat and solid execution. It delivers a thrilling Bayou-bound adventure that turns one of nature’s most underestimated animals into a genuinely effective screen monster, and may permanently ruin Fantasia for anyone who watches it.

Movie Rating:

Hungry trailer