You can’t have a picnic at the beach and then be upset when seagulls show up. And when you advertise a free-for-all python hunting contest offering cash to anyone willing to run through swamps in the middle of the night and bring back deadly snakes, you really have no right to complain when strange characters start appearing on your doorstep.

But it’s not like I have a better idea for culling the invasive Burmese python population in the Florida Everglades. Since 1992, when Hurricane Andrew ripped through Miami during a wildlife convention and released foreign species into the state’s swamps, these strangling snakes have been reproducing in the Everglades and feasting on native species. The vast majority of Florida preservation enthusiasts want these intruders gone — as do the vast majority of normal people, who don’t need a principled reason for preferring not to live anywhere near 20-foot pythons.

The prevalence of pythons, and the difficulty of removing them, has spawned a cottage industry of python hunters. The state of Florida has been willing to pay licensed professionals to spend their nights driving through deserted roads in the Everglades looking for these snakes and bringing them back dead. Eventually, some brilliant bureaucrats realized that humans are motivated by competition, and the Florida Python Challenge was born. Each October, Florida invites professional and amateur python hunters from around the world into the Everglades for a 10-night competition to see who can remove the most nocturnal snakes. The results are ultimately a drop in the bucket — most contests remove a couple hundred pythons from a population of several hundred thousand — but goddamn, does it make for some entertaining cinema.

Xander Robin’s documentary “The Python Hunt” follows a coterie of misfits who descend upon the Everglades to compete in the festivities. The ensemble of characters making up the Florida-fied “Cannonball Run” include Anne, a widowed grandmother and self-described “nature lover” who decides to enter the contest as one final adventure and demonstrates a sadistic obsession with stabbing pythons through the brain; Toby Benoit, a tobacco-chewing journalist and swamp enthusiast who offers to be Anne’s chaperone; and Jimbo, a local python hunting enthusiast who is so bitter about being banned from the event over cheating allegations that he spends his days making fake pythons to fool the out-of-state tourists that he looks down upon.

The hunters spend 10 nights prowling the back roads of the Everglades with the hope of reeling in the biggest snakes they can find, often demonstrating a blatant disregard for personal safety. The film features some impressive moments of snake spectacle, but the real attraction is the human drama that emerges from the larger-than-life personalities. Everyone has different motives, from principled preservationists to sadistic killers to observers who just look for different species like they’re playing a big game of Pokemon Go. And while it can be hilarious to see how much of their identity some people get from their status within a niche world of snake-hunting, the film does make space for some larger conversations about the role that extermination plays in preservation.

There’s no denying that the pythons pose a real threat to Florida’s ecosystems, but different voices in the python hunting community have different opinions about how to deal with it. Some feel that the gamified aspect of these hunting contests bring the wrong kind of people out of the woodwork, and giving them permission to kill pythons will eventually lead to them hurting the species we want to preserve. Others feel that government officials use the python problem as a sensational story to pull attention away from bigger environmental issues like pollution. And some are so libertarian in their approach to snake hunting that they think the government should play no role and simply leave Florida natives to tend to their own swamps. The conversations are fascinating, but it does sometimes feel like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as there has never been a successful removal of an invasive reptile population and the pythons are breeding much faster than anyone in Florida can get rid of them.

Nothing is ever certain in the world of film distribution, but I would be stunned if “The Python Hunt” doesn’t get picked up by a streamer and become at least a minor cultural phenomenon. The premise is too compelling and the characters are too zany for it not to crack the mainstream in some way. The “Florida Man Does Crazy Shit” trope has become overplayed in recent years (and if your bandwidth for such discourse is truly spent, perhaps seek your entertainment elsewhere), but “The Python Hunt” just might be the rare project that’s indescribable enough to break through a saturated niche and become the next “Tiger King.”

Grade: B+

“The Python Hunt” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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