Predator: Killer of Killers Review: Three Portraits of Prey

The cosmos casts its indifferent gaze upon human history and finds its reflection not in our monuments or poetry, but in our agents of destruction. A Viking warrior, a feudal Japanese swordsman, and a pilot from the last great war—each a pinnacle of lethality in their own age—are summoned from the timeline.

They are not heroes chosen to save, but killers selected to be killed. This animated anthology, born from the same creative mind that gave us Prey, continues that film’s stripping away of modern artifice. It seeks the raw substance of the hunt in different epochs of human conflict.

The film presents a triptych of slaughter, three distinct chronicles of violence that eventually bleed into a single, harrowing finale on a hostile world. The structure itself feels ritualistic, an offering of our most proficient fighters to a force that sees their skill only as a challenge. With its R-rating fully earned, the feature refuses to look away from the carnage. The animation is a canvas for visceral truths, rendering every shattered bone and torn ligament with an unnerving clarity. This is the franchise’s brutal premise taken to a grimly logical place.

A Monster to Fight Monsters

The first tale is forged in the ice and fury of the 9th century. We follow Ursa, a woman who is less a person and more a walking testament to vengeance. Is she a mother protecting her son, or a ghost leading him into her own grave? Her quest to avenge a past horror has hollowed her out, leaving only the sharp edges of her will.

The Nordic landscape mirrors this internal state—a vast, cold emptiness where life is a brief stain upon the snow. Amid this desolation, her human enemies are but a preamble, a ritual to prove her ferocity. Her bladed shields, instruments of defense perverted into tools for slaughter, move with a dreadful grace. She is the monster of her own story.

It is fitting, then, that her people look upon the true alien intruder and name it Grendel, pulling from the dark tapestry of their own myths to define an incomprehensible threat. They see a demon, but the universe sees a peer. The Predator’s arrival is not an interruption of her story but its apotheosis.

The cycle of human violence, having reached its peak in her triumph, calls out into the void, and the void answers with a purer, more patient form of predation. Her simple, human revenge is instantly dwarfed by an existential mandate: survive. The skills that made her a killer of men are now tested against something that hunts killers for sport.

The Silence Between Two Blades

From the noise of the Norsemen, we fall into a profound quiet. The second chapter unfolds in 17th-century Japan, a place rendered almost entirely without dialogue, as if the animosity at its center is too primal for words. Here, the conflict is an inheritance. Two brothers, a samurai and a ninja, are caught in the gravity of their father’s legacy, destined to prove their supremacy through a duel to the death.

Theirs is a language of sharpened steel and coiled posture, a silent conversation where every movement is a syllable of hate. The conflict is a stark meditation on duality—shadow and light, honor and stealth—two halves of a single warrior tradition turned inward to destroy itself.

The environment is an active participant in their deadly ballet. They move across the elegant fragility of a Japanese fortress, its paper screens and tiled roofs becoming a vertical battlefield. The architecture, meant for serene contemplation, is repurposed for a savage geometry of combat. When the Predator descends, it is an interruption from a different dimension of violence, one that cares nothing for their codes or their blood feud.

It is a presence so alien that it forces the brothers into a fragile, unspoken truce. The striking green of the creature’s blood, when finally spilled, serves as a baptism. It is a foreign color that momentarily unites them, washing over their shared history of red and forcing them to face a terror that exists outside their suffocating world of sibling strife.

The Sky as Abattoir

We are then thrown forward into the age of machines. The third story is told through the roar of an engine and the static of a radio, a jarring departure from the elemental quiet of the past. Our hero, Torres, is a mechanic who yearns to fly, a man whose ambition is to merge with the machinery of war.

His voice fills the air, a stark contrast to the silence of the samurai, yet this chatter feels like a defense mechanism—a way to assert humanity against the cold indifference of the sky. He represents a new kind of warrior, one whose flesh is shielded by steel and whose fight is waged at a distance. But what is a tin can against a star?

The combat here is a chaotic physics problem, a dogfight between a relic of human ingenuity and a vessel that treats our sky like its private hunting ground. Planes are not just shot down; they are cubed, harpooned, and erased with an alien geometry. Torres’s frantic efforts, patching his own fragile machine while falling through the air, are an absurd testament to the human will.

It is the desperate act of an organism refusing its own obsolescence. The Predator in this chapter is a different beast, a hunter of systems as much as people. The hunt is no longer a visceral, ground-level confrontation of muscle and bone. It is a cold, technological purge conducted from an untouchable distance, turning the vast blue expanse into a slaughterhouse.

A Museum of Killers

The disparate threads of history are finally braided together in a place that feels outside of it. The Viking, the samurai, and the pilot are unceremoniously plucked from their timelines and deposited onto a stage of scorched earth under an alien sky. They have been collected, curated. They are no longer participants in their own stories but living exhibits in a grand, cosmic museum dedicated to the art of the kill.

The final act reveals the Yautja not merely as hunters but as connoisseurs of violence, a species whose culture crystallizes in the gladiatorial arena. We are given a chilling glimpse into their society: a roaring crowd of monsters demanding a spectacle of death. Their world is a coliseum. Their civilization is built upon the worship of a clean kill. This is not a hunt for sustenance or security; it is a ritual, a form of theater where the only drama is survival and the only applause is a death cry.

In this crucible, the intensely personal motivations that drove each warrior are burned away. Ursa’s vengeance, the brothers’ rivalry, Torres’s ambition—these human things become meaningless artifacts in the face of a singular, collective imperative. Stripped of context and common language, they must forge a new understanding from shared glances and battle rhythms.

Their teamwork is not a story of friendship; it is a pragmatic alliance of the doomed, a desperate synergy of shield, sword, and modern ingenuity against a force that sees them as interchangeable. The finale is a frantic symphony of their combined skills, a chaotic masterpiece of survival. Its open-ended nature offers no solace, only a lingering question. They may have won the match, but they are still trapped in the gallery, their victory just another thrilling moment for their captors before the next exhibition is mounted.

An Illustrated Carnage

The film’s philosophy is encoded in its very aesthetic. It rejects the pursuit of realism for the feel of a living illustration, a blood-soaked graphic novel come to life. The animation is deliberately imperfect, its movements sometimes stuttering with an uncanny rhythm that gives every action a sense of weight and fatalism.

Characters move like figures in a dark fable, their motion divorced from the smoothness of reality, which poses a question: does this stylization create a safe distance from the horror, or does it heighten the sense that we are watching a nightmare unfold? The art direction gives each era a distinct soul—the unforgiving monochrome of the Viking snows, the sharp, elegant lines of the Japanese fortress, the oil-and-smoke chaos of the wartime sky. Each setting is a beautifully rendered stage for its particular brand of human suffering.

This animated approach allows for a unique portrayal of violence. The carnage is absolute, earning its rating with every severed limb and crushed skull. Yet, rendered in this illustrative style, the gore becomes something other than grotesque. It is both explicit and abstract; a fountain of blood is a splash of crimson ink across the frame.

This artistic rendering of brutality is unsettling. It aestheticizes the act of being torn apart, making the visceral beautiful without sanitizing its impact. The body is a canvas, and the violence is a brutal form of art. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score acts as the connective tissue for these bloody vignettes, a cinematic pulse that insists on a tragic gravity, ensuring the film never mistakes its litany of death for simple entertainment.

Predator: Killer of Killers is a 2025 American adult animated science fiction action horror anthology film that expands the Predator franchise. Released on June 6, 2025, Predator: Killer of Killers is available for streaming on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ internationally.

Full Credits

Directors: Dan Trachtenberg, Joshua Wassung

Writer: Micho Robert Rutare

Producers: John Davis, Dan Trachtenberg, Marc Toberoff, Ben Rosenblatt

Executive Producers: Lawrence Gordon, James E. Thomas, John C. Thomas, Stefan Grube

Voice Cast: Lindsay LaVanchy, Louis Ozawa Changchien, Rick Gonzalez, Michael Biehn

Animation Director: Alaa Afifeh

Editor: Stefan Grube

Composer: Benjamin Wallfisch