Locarno review: Hyena (2025)

Pardi di Domani
International Competition
Pardino d’Oro Arts3 Foundation Award for Best International Short Film

In the opening of Altay Ulan Yang’s visual stunner Hyena, which scooped the Pardino D’Oro Award for Best International Film at the Locarno Film Festival, we are informed that each year, nearly one million students in China attend intensive art training camps to perfect their Western painting technique with the ultimate goal of being accepted into prestigious universities worldwide. It’s a kind of intro that leads you to feel like attending a screening of a documentary that centres around the topic. White letters with the information touch the muscular body of a male in motion, his skin covered in sweat, his face consumed with high tension as he focuses on his target. He moves like an athlete who’s about to throw either a spear or a disc, and not like an art student during a peculiar type of unacademic performance. We are right inside the belly of an all-male boarding art school, where the competition doesn’t stop in the painting class. In Yang’s take on the academic competitiveness, things get serious, wild and quite unlike anything we are initially led to believe.

Is there a better place for a horror setting than a storm-battered castle packed with copies of antique statues, which also adorn its front garden? In this eerie place, where fleeing becomes impossible due to the weather conditions, the Mongolian director recounts his own traumatic experience from a similarly-looking painting training camp 12 years ago, where he “existed as both perpetrator and victim” in an environment where “violence unfolded daily”. He is slipping again in those shoes (he is one of the three leads), not as a victim, but as the jealousy-eaten head tormentor who is the very man from the above-mentioned opener.

Hyena gradually evolves into a case study of isolation and its consequences, honest to the bone, through its finely tuned character development. Yang proves to be a versatile artist, not just as a writer, but also equally skilled as the man behind and in front of the lens. He finds the ideal support in the lensing of his two cinematographers, Fang Jiacheng and Hu Jinghai, who serve us a delightful black & white feast of impressive, beautifully framed, highly contrasted images of dread, agony, resistance and regret. Slow motion and fast-paced scenes enter a mad tango with each other, not only wonderfully choreographed by the director’s hand, but additionally mastered by the editing department.

True talents become easy targets in the dorm where supervisors, uninterested in what’s happening outside the classroom, never set foot. A gang of mischievous young men, clad in bandanas and T-shirts featuring American rock bands (although few go shirtless), rules the campus, fighting for their place on the top-ranking list. The way they are represented sends us back to the 1980s US “hood movies,” with notable influences from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish” and a dash of silliness from Joel Schumacher’s “The Lost Boys” (1987). Unlike the latter, Hyena purposely uses banality as a tool to dig deeper, and not just to entertain. Besides, it would not be easy to enjoy all the devilry the gang comes up with in their quest to make the fellow students suffer an endless act of bullying, because the script offers much more than an action-reaction relationship.

Another thing springs to mind after having seen the movie. The alligator, which reappears in it with its majestic, lazy “look at me b*tches” coolness, has the equal impact on the viewer as Miguel Gomes’ crocodile in “Tabu” (2012), threatening and challenging the viewer with the promise of something more coming their way, but not delivering it, insinuating that whatever we see or perceive as a threat is just the product of our fantasy or deeperst fears. Horror is inside our minds, and the illusion of a beast being after us, given in the form of an animal, is indicative of something else: A human is the human’s biggest enemy.

Hyena will go places not only because of its Locarno big win, but because it speaks volumes about the human condition, about the vicious circle of power games, and its universality. Do not miss the opportunity to see it if you happen to have it screened somewhere near you!

Country: USA
Language: Chinese
Runtime: 21′
Written| Directed by: Altay Ulan Yang
DoP(s): Fang Jiacheng, Hu Jinghai
Production: X100 Films
Producer: Edyta Yutong Deng
Executive Producer: Altay Ulan Yang
Production Designer: Zhou Guanghan
Set Dressers: Guan Ruochen, Wang Hanhai, Wang Yu, Zhang Yiming
Props Master: Zhu Xiaowei
Editors: Zhang Zhongchen, Altay Ulan Yang
On-site Editor: Chen Zihan
Art Director: Sun Shangzhe
Music: Chen Ruotong
Cast: Hou Tianyu, Huo Zhengjie, Altay Ulan Yang
Sales: Lights On