A Loving and Hilarious Portrayal: The Python Hunt Film Review
Still from The Python Hunt.
The “Florida Man” type has been prevalent for many years as an easy shorthand for a type of person who comes from the, as someone describes in the film The Python Hunt, “the butthole of America.” There’s a cottage industry of Reddit posts, late night talk show jokes, and easy jokes of all stripes just goofing on people from Florida, which can sometimes veer on being mean spirited, at least to me. That’s why I am happy for the work of both Xander Robin (who was last part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival when he screened his feature debut Are We Not Cats in 2017) and Lance Oppenheim (who to me is the most exciting force in documentary filmmaking of the 2020’s, through his remarkable work Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld and HBO doc series Ren Faire), both who hail from South Florida, so they know this world inside and out. Robin and Oppenheim join forces on The Python Hunt which is a loving but hilarious look at a python removal contest the Florida government runs in the Everglades.
“Loving but hilarious” is to me the term; of course some of the subjects captured in the film are ridiculous and absurd, but the film never points and laughs at them. They are all earnest in their journey to kill these pythons for various reasons (environmental, monetary, or just simply for the love of game) and the film does a really great job of capturing these people, as you get invested in their journey. Honestly, the biggest joke of a character in the film is the person from San Franscio who travels to Florida to participate in the contest, who tries to lean into Florida stereotypes, like he’s some culture vulture.
A hallmark of Lance Oppenheim’s work that extends to this film is how beautiful it is shot, making frankly some of the most beautiful documentaries ever made. The structure of these films, which definitely extends to ‘The Python Hunt’ is a narrative focus where you sometimes forget that it’s a documentary for how cinematic it looks. I genuinely don’t know how Oppenheim and Robin do it, but I think it’s such a cool way to draw focus to the story, which includes the wonderful downbeat score by Nick Leon.
In a crowded field of documentary filmmaking, no one has done better work this decade than Lance Oppenheim, whether he’s directing it or producing it like he did on The Python Hunt. Do not miss The Python Hunt when it hits a wider release in 2026.