“The Hunting Ground,” a documentary shocker about rape on American college campuses, goes right for the gut. A blunt instrument of a movie, it derives its power largely from the many young women and some men recounting on camera how they were raped at their schools and then subsequently denied justice by those same schools. Their stories — delivered in sorrow and rage, with misting eyes and squared jaws — make this imperfect movie a must-watch work of cine-activism, one that should be seen by anyone headed to college and by those already on campus.
The movie arrives in the midst of a vigorous, sometimes furious and at times crudely simplistic national discussion about sexual assault. Fueling that discussion is the Obama administration, which has made the issue a priority. In 2014, the White House released guidelines on how campus rapes are to be treated. In a move that continues to make waves, it also released the names of 55 schools — from Harvard College to the University of California, Berkeley — that were under investigation by the Department of Education for their handling (or mishandling) of rape accusations. At issue is whether they violated federal laws under Title IX, which bans gender discrimination at colleges receiving federal money.
In “The Hunting Ground,” the writer-director Kirby Dick, working with the producer Amy Ziering, crams a crowd of faces and one seemingly unwieldy subject into a painful, absorbing, if periodically cluttered 103-minute documentary. (The filmmaking pair previously collaborated on the documentaries “Outrage,” about homophobia among American political elites, and “The Invisible War,” about sexual assault in the United States military.) Subscribing to the more-is-more school of documentary, the director pulls out all of the stops in this movie, using talking-head interviews, vérité-like scenes, seemingly generic archival imagery, seemingly nongeneric archival imagery and numerous graphics, including some footnote-like citations. Visually the movie is somewhat of a mess, and although that can be frustrating, it does reflect, wittingly or not, the cacophony defining the current discourse on rape.
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A version of this review appears in print on February 27, 2015, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Searing Look at Campus Rape, and the Traumatic Quest for Justice. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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