On a dark desert highway, cold rain hammering his windscreen, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) picks up a lone hitchhiker. It’s an action he soon regrets. As the hitchhiker, John Ryder (Rutger Hauer) plunges Jim into a violent game of cat and mouse.
Director Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher is a genre-defying gem of a film. It isn’t quite a horror or action thriller, but it straddles both sides of the road to be a perfect hybrid of the two. Harmon’s tightly controlled direction generates an increasingly taut atmosphere as the body count rises, and Halsey futilely tries to extricate himself from the madness.
Harmon’s use of the New Mexico desert is employed to stunning effect. He truly creates a sense that there simply isn’t anywhere to run to. The lonely landscape is unrelentingly stark, flat, and endless.
There’s a supernatural quality to John Ryder, although it isn’t implicitly implied that he is a supernatural being. However, he is, very deliberately presented as a man without a past, without a history. He kills for the sheer pleasure of it. Just his name alone, Ryder, suggests that he travels the lonely highways forever, seeking his next victim or waiting for an opponent to be worthy enough to stop him.
Jim Halsey is that opponent. He’s put through a horrifying ordeal, including being framed for mass murder. But he’s not alone in his ordeal, for he is befriended by Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The friendship is brutally extinguished by Ryder, prompting Jim to abandon his genial nature and become a mirror image of the killer in order to stop him.
As this is a Second Sight release, the extras are as bountiful as you’d expect. There are cast and crew commentaries, the obligatory trailers and The Projection Booth Podcast with Harmon and Hauer. There’s In Bullseye:, a new interview with director Robert Harmon and Penning the Ripper: a new interview with writer Eric Red.
If that isn’t enough, there’s Doomed to Live, a new interview with C Thomas Howell; The Man from Oz, a new interview with director of photography John Seale; and A Very Formative Score, an interview with composer Mark Isham. There’s also a 20-minute film featuring the work of Rutger Hauer and short films by Robert Harmon and Eric Red.
THE HITCHER is available in 4K UHD and Blu-ray from September 30th. You can pre-order here.
