Hangry
2021 · 12m · United States
Directed by Bola Ogun
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Teenage Rae dreams of escaping to college, but her abusive stepfather Leroy keeps drinking away her tuition money and stealing her dying mother's pain pills; when she finds out, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every other abuse-revenge thriller, but Ogun's willingness to let the humor and horror sit in the same room without choosing a lane is genuinely disorienting—that's the subversion, not the plot.
A sturdy genre exercise that knows its debts to both social realism and exploitation cinema, though the tonal oscillation feels more gestural than formally integrated into the film's architecture.
The darkly comic register is the entire film—that tonal choice is what transforms a grim premise into something that lands; Ogun commits to the weird laugh-horror space and never blinks, and a 12-minute budget becomes invisible because of it.
Reviews
Ogun's work with the camera is gritty and smart, keeping you captivated from the opening to the final frame. Well, she firmly, unapologetically, and triumphantly does the latter.