Brutal, Flawed, and Hard to Ignore

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MOVIE REVIEWS
Hunting Jessica Brok
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Genre: Action, Thriller
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 2h 14m
Director(s): Alastair Orr
Writer(s): Garth McCarthy, David D. Jones, Alastair Orr
Cast: Danica Jones, Anthony Oseyemi, Clyde Berning, Richard Lukunku
Where to Watch: only in select theaters, February 13, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: What happens when survival stops being heroic and starts feeling imperative? HUNTING JESSICA BROK offers the audience a familiar silhouette of a genre archetype — the retired operative, the quiet life, the past that won’t stay buried — but it quickly makes clear that this isn’t a story interested in comfort. Alastair Orr’s film wants exhaustion, consequence, and moral abrasion, even when those ambitions strain against the limits of its own structure.

Danica Jones carries the film with a performance rooted in physicality and emotional bluntness. Jessica Brok isn’t styled as myth or fantasy; she’s a body that absorbs punishment, keeps moving, and rarely gets the relief she feels she deserves. The film introduces her in exile, living under an alias, raising her daughter in rural South Africa, attempting to live a fragile existence with a history defined by sanctioned violence. That setup isn’t just window dressing — it’s the tension the film never lets her escape.

Orr’s direction leans heavily into this idea of violence as reactivation rather than empowerment. When Jessica is dragged back into a conflict, the film doesn’t treat it as a return to form. It treats it as corrosion. Each moment of action is framed less as victory than as evidence of something being stripped away. According to the production notes, the intention was never to build a revenge fantasy, but to explore what happens when a survivor is forced to become “worse” than the person she tried to leave behind. That clarity is one of the film’s strongest assets.

South Africa isn’t romanticized or softened; it’s vast, exposed, and indifferent. Orr uses the environment as pressure rather than backdrop, emphasizing how isolation compounds danger. The terrain doesn’t rescue Jessica, and it doesn’t align with her survival either. It simply exists, another force she has to endure. That choice grounds the film in something harsher than the survival thrillers it will surely be compared to.

The antagonists, led by Anthony Oseyemi’s Lazar Ipacs, are designed less as personalities than as systems of cruelty. Lazar’s obsession with ritualized violence and psychological dominance reflects the film’s interest in power dynamics rather than spectacle. At its best, this approach gives the conflict weight. At its worst, it flattens the villains into embodiments of excess, with insufficient differentiation to sustain the runtime.

That's where HUNTING JESSICA BROK begins to struggle to hold together. At 134 minutes, the film demands endurance from its audience, just as it demands it from its protagonist. While that parallel feels intentional, it doesn’t always feel justified. Several sequences reiterate the same emotional and physical impact without adding new insight, stretching tension into repetition. The film understands brutality, but it struggles with inflection.

Jones’ performance remains the connection point through those stretches. She brings a ferocity that feels earned rather than performed, especially in moments where exhaustion overtakes control. The film repeatedly emphasizes that Jessica is never “fine” after violence — she bleeds, wavers, and carries the damage forward. That insistence prevents the movie from slipping into empowerment cosplay, even when its structure flirts with familiar revenge tropes.

The script sometimes undercuts its own seriousness. Certain confrontations rely on dialogue that feels more functional than revealing, and a few character interactions are telegraphed long before they arrive. The film seeks to interrogate trauma, but it occasionally resorts to shorthand rather than trusting silence or implication.

Where HUNTING JESSICA BROK succeeds most is in refusing to moralize its ending. Survival doesn’t come with clarity or absolution. Jessica’s victory, such as it is, feels provisional — a pause rather than a conclusion. The film resists the urge to suggest that violence heals or that vengeance restores balance. It leaves its protagonist alive, altered, and unresolved.

It’s a work driven by conviction more than precision, and that imbalance is both its strength and its limitation. Orr’s ambition is evident in every choice, even when execution wobbles. The film may not fully escape the gravity of its influences, but it refuses to imitate them passively.

HUNTING JESSICA BROK is a demanding watch — physically, emotionally, and structurally. It’s longer than it needs to be, rougher than it sometimes realizes, and occasionally trapped by the very genre it’s trying to subvert. But it’s also anchored by a performance and a perspective that refuse easy comfort. That friction is the point, even when it doesn’t entirely bring all of the pieces together. This is a film that survives itself — scarred, imperfect, and stubbornly standing.

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[photo courtesy of QUIVER DISTRIBUTION, KNOWN ASSOCIATES ENTERTAINMENT, A-GAME PRODUCTIONS]

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