The End of the Game
Vegan filmmaker David Graham Scott travels to Africa to follow Guy Wallace, an aging big game hunter, on what Wallace calls his last hunt for Cape buffalo. Scott makes no secret of his own discomfort with the practice, and that tension shapes the film: he keeps his camera on Wallace's justifications, his decades of experience in the bush, and the mechanics of the hunt itself, rather than softening the material for an audience already inclined to disapprove. The two men talk through what drives a hunter to keep chasing dangerous game into old age, and what the animal's death actually looks like up close, without the usual wildlife-documentary distance. Scott's outsider position gives the film its edge; he is not making a case for trophy hunting, but he lets Wallace make his own case at length. The result sits somewhere between ethnographic portrait and ethical argument, following one man's ritual to its end without settling the question of whether it should exist at all.