Hy3na world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026
Two women, Nicole (Kirsten Kaster) and blue-haired Rachel (Storm Steenson), dance close in bisexual lighting on a crowded dance floor. “Best friends one minute,” Rachel whispers to Nicole, “but as soon as you add a boy…”, and she starts strangling Nicole then and there. Somehow Nicole regains consciousness wrapped in plastic sheeting in the back of a speeding car that Rachel is driving, and grabs Rachel from behind, causing the car to have a head-on collision. Next there is an explosive montage of past murders, with Rachel clearly the killer, and a horrified looking Nicole just along for the ride.
This kaleidoscopic blast of decontextualised images has been just the disorientingly impressionistic prologue to Matthew Ninaber’s Hy3na, which then, after a woman’s voiceover is heard declaring, “The question is, how did we get here?”, shifts to the arrival of detective Hugh (Jeremy Ninaber) and his married police partner Dan (played by the director) at the scene of the accident, where two other plastic-wrapped bodies have been found in the car, and Nicole, as the only survivor still in situ, is the prime suspect. “Fuck,” says Dan when he first sees Nicole, clearly recognising her and carefully recusing himself from her interrogation – forcing Hugh simultaneously to play, as he puts it, good cop and bad cop to tease out the details of what has happened, and hopefully to clear up what Dan describes as “six months of investigation, eight dead bodies, no leads”.
Like Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality (1994), Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), Tony Scott’s Domino (2005), Daniel C. Nyiri’s Confession (2020), Felipe Mucci’s Detained (2024) and D.C. Hamilton’s The Interrogation of Anna Goode (2025), Hy3na is structured as a series of interlocking flashbacks narrated from a police interrogation – and in particular Nicole, like Domino Harvey in Scott’s film, is essentially performing a narrative striptease for her interrogator, sexing up her story with a lurid account of her initially erotic relationship with Rachel, of her initiation into Rachel’s world as a cam girl, and of her own quest for a Prince Charming to come and rescue her. There is of course a long tradition of cinema’s interrogation scenes concealing as much as they reveal, and several conflicting details in Nicole’s story suggest that she may not be the most reliable of narrators – but still, as a picture forms of good girl Nicole breaking bad and popping more and more of those red pills that her new flatmate supplies, while experienced, worldly, confident Rachel plays the id to Nicole’s ego, violently eliminating her rivals and even turning on any of her suitors who seem less than interested, we truly are learning everything there is to know about both these very different young women, with just one key piece of information being withheld, but increasingly guessable for the film savvy.
Garish, camp and a little sleazy, Hy3na plays out as part erotic thriller and part hard-boiled neo(n)-noir, but it is also concerned with a Lynchian woman in trouble, struggling to fit together the fragments of her life. Dan, who has briefly gone out both with Nicole and with Rachel, knows full well just how crazy the former can be in her jealousy and possessiveness – and as Ninaber’s film, co-written with Jannah Kitzman, loops back to its starting point without ever quite closing its circle, the viewer is left to pick up the pieces while revelling in all the lurid stylisation. Nicole and Rachel’s toxic co-dependency is always colliding head-on with a boy – and Dan is just the latest in a series of men to form a bizarre love triangle with this close, yet odd, couple.
strap: Matthew Ninaber’s neon-lit erotic psychothriller interrogates a novice cam girl’s proximity to and toxic friendship with a serial killer
© Anton Bitel
