“The Hunter” by Diego Ospina Melo is not a film that settles for existing solely on the screen. It infiltrates the viewer’s mental space and occupies the cracks where experimental cinema tends to thrive. Ospina, coming from a background in visual arts, does not narrate in a conventional sense but rather proposes a ritualistic game in which mise en scène becomes a field of forces.

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     There are echoes of a lineage of cinema that treats the image as plastic matter. At times one is reminded of Matthew Barney’s collisions between performance and camera, and at others the symbolic irony of Kenneth Anger. The use of high-definition cinematography results in images of almost aggressive clarity, yet what inhabits them is ambiguity. Hunting becomes existence, and existence itself becomes performance.

Time appears fragmented, dissolved into pulses, as if the cut itself were breathing. This structure aligns “The Hunter” with filmmakers who have explored cinema as a symbolic language. Tarkovsky emerges as a spiritual reference, though here irony plays a contemporary and almost pop role. Ospina places the natural and the artificial side by side without justification, and it is precisely for this reason that the encounter feels both inevitable and at times comical.

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     What impresses is not the search for a central meaning but the refusal to create hierarchies. In “The Hunter,” the star does not shine brighter than the skin, the skin holds no greater value than the object, and the gesture is no heavier than its shadow. Everything is given equal weight, recalling at moments the works of Harun Farocki, though here reframed as fable.

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The result is a work that can be read both as a wordless fable and as an expanded installation. Ospina suggests that hunting is not merely the search for something external but an act of becoming vulnerable to the speed of one’s own gaze. The film chooses to dwell in the space of uncertainty, where symbol and action merge, leaving the viewer with the unsettling sense of having been hunted by the image itself.