Locarno Review: Manhunt Is a Visceral Descent Into Modern Adolescent Masculinity

Are the kids all right? The latest movie to ponder this age-old question is Wayne Wapeemukwa’s Manhunt, an adolescent road movie told through the prism of true crime—or perhaps it’s the other way around. At times it can resmble a run-of-the-mill boys-trip movie replete with greasy diners, campsite encounters, and the occasional suggestion of sex. At others it more suggests something birthed from Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD stable, not least a late dive into washed-out, game-brained psychedelia. It’s very worth keeping an eye out for.

Manhunt marks Wapeemukwa’s first feature since 2017’s Luk’Luk’i earned the award for best Canadian debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the intervening years, Wapeemukwa, who is of Canadian indigenous Michif extraction, received a PhD in philosophy from Penn State before returning to Canada to take on a postdoctoral fellowship at the university of British Columbia. Few filmmakers can boast such lofty credentials, and if they do, they tend not to make movies that are as gripping and visceral as this.

Watching it in Locarno, Korine’s recent projects came to mind as soon as I heard the coarse (and basically unprintable) dialogue being shot back and forth in the opening scene. That sequence introduces the film’s protagonists, Joey and Kit (portrayed with bags of energy by Harris Lowe and Landon Tunold, respectively), who are communicating the way boys do over headsets while mowing down other players (and each other) in the fictional shooter from which Manhunt takes its name. After a bit of this raunchy back and forth, Kit ask Joey for a progress report on a project they’ve been developing, at which point the camera cuts to show us the device being created on Joey’s 3D printer—a section of what will later become a bright-pink, sporadically functional rifle.

Far from a finger-wagging cautionary tale, Manhunt is neither documentary-like or, for the most part, a dramatization of actual events, though more-than-loosely based on a killing spree that took place in British Columbia circa 2019 when two young men, Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky, indiscriminately murdered three strangers while taking a road trip. Manhunt is not out to sensationalize those events (Wapeemukwa has wisely changed the victims entirely) but explore with a curious, open mind the kind of lives, choices, influences, temperaments, testosterone levels, and societal pressures that might have led a couple of teenage friends to do such awful things.

What Wapeemukwa does attempt is to aestheticize how the boys’ video-game-addled minds might, when left unchecked, slip into an understanding of the world not as a place populated by humans but NPCs. This is why, when Joey and Kit make a pitstop and meet two attractive German tourists who buy them lunch and ask for a ride, we are immediately put on high alert. This happens right after a first act in which Joey’s home life is shown and Kit’s only hinted at. Joey, the more handsome and introverted of the two, lives with his grandma and his boozy but affable dad. As they’re about to leave in their beat-down van, we see Kit receiving a relatively loving goodbye from his father—the point being that you won’t find any easy answers here.

Manhunt is really at its best from the point its duo becomes four, with Wapeemukwa allowing all kinds of potential futures to open up in real time and making the bluntness of what inevitably comes next hit that much harder. Wapeemukwa then allows the film’s key visual idea (a garish descent into hyperreal blues and oranges) to race towards its conclusion—in other words, oblivion.

_Manhunt _premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.