Hungry is a 2026 creature feature written and directed by James Nunn, released in select cinemas in June by Aura Entertainment. It follows a group of tourists on a riverboat tour through the Louisiana bayou who are hunted by a rampaging hippopotamus, and stars Madison Davenport as Sistine, Olivia Bernstone as Hannah, Tracey Bonner as Dionne, Michel Curiel as the boat's captain Rodrigo, alongside Jim Meskimen, Samantha Coughlan and Joaquim de Almeida. It holds a fifty-six percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning opinion is genuinely split. I am on the unimpressed side of that split, and comfortably so.

I want to open by saying that I cannot believe this film exists. I have watched it, I have verified that it is real, and some part of me still refuses to accept it.

Here is the shortest review I will ever write. A hippo kills everybody except one person, and the person it spares is the one who saved its baby. That is the plot. That is the arc, the theme and the resolution, delivered in a single sentence.

Now, the chain of events that produces all of this begins with one woman wanting to see a big alligator. That is the entire inciting incident. She wants a gator. What she gets is a hippo, which is an animal with an entirely different disposition and a significantly worse temper.

From there, she proceeds to almost directly cause the deaths of three separate people through a sequence of genuinely baffling decisions, and the film continues to frame her as someone to whom things are happening rather than as the person making them happen. She functions as a second antagonist and the script refuses to acknowledge it. I am not alone in noticing this, as other viewers have raised precisely the same objection, pointing out that a character whose actions make her the villain is nonetheless treated as a victim throughout. She eventually dies, which I would describe as narratively appropriate.

There are, in fairness, a few things surrounding this film that are more interesting than the film itself.

The first is that, despite the title and despite a poster clearly engineered to make you think otherwise, this is not an adaptation of Hungry Hungry Hippos. It has no connection to it whatsoever. The people behind it have been entirely content to let audiences assume there is one, which is comfortably the sharpest decision made during this production.

The second genuinely surprised me. The premise draws on real American history. There was an actual proposal in the early twentieth century to import hippopotamuses into the Louisiana bayou and farm them as a meat source, a plan which was seriously considered and ultimately abandoned. So the film is a what-if constructed around a real historical idea, which is considerably more thought than I had credited it with.