HYENA
dir. Altay Ulan Yang

Each year, nearly a million Chinese students pass through intensive art training camps, all chasing the same narrow doorway into a prestigious university. Only one percent get through. Hyena opens on that statistic, then plunges into the sealed, storm-battered world it produces: a castle-turned-studio where a class of student artists wait out an exam and, over one night, tear each other apart.

The film arrives as memory, a black-and-white recounting, an alligator stalking a classroom, a frog leaping from a sculpture, before we land inside a class ruled by a student nicknamed 90, so called for the score no one else can touch. He is angelic, immaculate, and intolerable to the others, who behave more like a pack than a cohort. They bully him, urinate on his bed, and slowly pull our narrator, the protagonist, known as Master, into their orbit.

Theme
This is a film about mob formation: how a group stabilises itself by manufacturing a common enemy, and how easily a bystander becomes a participant. Master watches, is repulsed, and still cannot leave, and eventually joins in. It reads as an allegory for something larger: humans as territorial animals, dressed in the language of art and academic ambition but governed by the same primal hierarchies as any pack. The director has said the film grew from his own experience at sixteen, existing as both perpetrator and victim in a studio much like this one, and that the choice of victim is almost arbitrary: if not 90, it would have been 80, or 85. The violence isn't really about him at all; he's simply where the pressure finds its release.

Execution
The craft matches the ambition. The production design is immersive and specific, and the black-and-white photography draws on old-master chiaroscuro, framing bodies and faces the way a life-drawing class might. The mix of off-speed and standard footage, and the way focus is used to pull the eye toward a single detail in a crowded frame, gives the film a controlled, painterly rhythm, a deliberate counterpoint to the increasingly feral behaviour on screen. The percussive score builds tension without ever tipping into melodrama, and the sound design earns its best moment when the echo of the boys' laughter dissolves into the scratch of charcoal on paper, violence and art rendered, briefly, as the same gesture. The storm outside is the obvious metaphor, but it's handled with restraint rather than heavy-handedness; the boys' shirtless, "Lord of the Flies" ascent to beat 90 is where the film is at its most unguarded and its most disturbing.

Final Thoughts
This is the work of an assured filmmaker in full command of tone, image, and pacing, someone willing to sit inside ugliness long enough to find its beauty without ever excusing it. Hyena doesn't resolve or moralise; the storm passes, the incident goes unspoken, and that silence is the point. Few 20-minute films leave this much of a strong aftertaste.

Review by Helena Brooks

8.9/10