When Amnesia Meets Ennui
Jean Rollin’s La Nuit des Traquées (The Night of the Hunted) asks a chilling “what if” question: What if you made a horror movie where nothing scary happened, but everything felt vaguely sticky? The premise sounds intriguing — a mysterious environmental accident leaves people wandering around with their memories dissolving like sugar cubes in cheap coffee. Unfortunately, Rollin’s execution turns this high-concept idea into a slow-motion slog of blank stares, whispered dialogue, and softcore interludes that make you wish you could catch the disease yourself just to forget the last 90 minutes.
Meet Elizabeth: Forgettable in Every Way
Brigitte Lahaie stars as Elizabeth, a woman on the run who can’t remember who she is, where she came from, or why she’s stuck in a movie that feels like it was shot during someone’s lunch break. Rescued by Robert — played by Vincent Gardère, who seems to have attended the “Acting Is Just Talking Louder” school — she immediately establishes her character’s main traits: confusion, nudity, and the ability to repeat her lines like she’s trapped in a broken answering machine.
Memory Loss Is the Real Special Effect
Elizabeth’s plight is part of a larger epidemic: people’s minds are deteriorating until they’re basically meat mannequins wandering a sterile high-rise clinic. It could have been terrifying. It could have been a metaphor for aging, dementia, or modern alienation. Instead, it’s just an excuse for Rollin to film endless tracking shots of glass hallways, punctuated by the occasional sex scene that has all the eroticism of a damp handshake. You don’t feel tension, you feel time passing — slowly, like a sedative kicking in.
Robert, the Hero Who Shouldn’t Have Bothered
Robert, bless him, decides to rescue Elizabeth even after being told she’s doomed to lose everything that makes her “her.” But instead of a pulse-pounding mission, his rescue attempts are more like errands. He spends half the runtime wandering Paris looking concerned, and the other half trying to make Elizabeth remember his face — which is a bit rich, considering he looks like the kind of man you’d forget was standing behind you in a checkout line.
The Clinic of the Mildly Perturbed
The hospital where the amnesiac patients are kept is run by Dr. Francis (Bernard Papineau), who is one part scientist, one part bureaucrat, and 100% done with everyone’s nonsense. His approach to treatment? Keep the patients locked up, wait until their minds are gone, and then quietly “dispose” of them. There’s supposed to be moral horror here, but it’s all delivered in the same hushed monotone, like a late-night infomercial for memory foam pillows.
Sex, Sadness, and Fluorescent Lighting
Because this is a Jean Rollin film, there’s nudity — lots of it — but even the eroticism is half-asleep. Imagine if someone tried to combine Last Tango in Paris with a brochure for a medical imaging center. The sex scenes feel like obligations, shoehorned in between endless conversations where nobody remembers what they just said. The lighting is flat, the staging is awkward, and the whole thing feels like it should be scored with elevator music.
The Grand Finale: Slow Dance Into Oblivion
Eventually, Robert finds Elizabeth again, only to discover she’s completely gone mentally — just a husk in nice hair. Dr. Francis shoots Robert in the head (finally, some decisive action), and now the two lovers shuffle off together, hand in hand, blissfully unaware of who they are or why they’re there. It’s meant to be tragic and poetic. It plays more like the end of a bad date where you both forgot your names and the check never came.
Final Verdict: A Film That Forgets Itself
La Nuit des Traquées could have been a haunting meditation on identity and mortality. Instead, it’s a droning art-house zombie film without zombies, scares, or urgency. Rollin’s pacing makes molasses look like a sprint, and the script repeats itself so often you’ll start wondering if your Blu-ray player is skipping. If the memory-loss plague was real, this would be the first movie I’d volunteer to watch so I could blissfully erase it from my brain.
Cast Brigitte Lahaie as Elizabeth Vincent Gardère as Robert Dominique Journet as Véronique Bernard Papineau as Le Docteur Francis Rachel Mhas as Solange Catherine Greiner Nathalie Perrey as La Mère (credited as Natalie Perrey) Christian Farina Élodie Delage as Marie (credited as Véronique Délaissé) Cyril Val (credited as Alain Plumey) Jean Hérel as Jacques Jacques Gatteau as Pierre Dominique Saint-Clare Grégoire Cherlian as Le Gardien Jean Cherlian as L’homme de Main
