The Hunt
the perfect horror of the third-person-omniscient narrative
I just finished watching The Hunt, a truly intense film starring everyone’s favourite Dane, Mads Mikkelsen (perhaps known to you as Dr. Lecter from TV’s Hannibal) and directed by true original Thomas Vinterberg, who seems to unreasonably require a subtext of child abuse to get a movie distributed outside of his home country.
This blog is not really about reviews and so this will simply be a short post on the thing that really struck me about The Hunt: the way in which the use of the third-person-omniscient narrative exponentially ramps up the horror and tension.
*****SPOILER ALERT*****
Well, not really, but I’ll play it safe for those zealots out there who never want to know anything about a film they’re going to see. Mads Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a small town schoolteacher falsely accused of inappropriate sexual conduct by one of the children at the school.
For context, the girl who makes the original accusation is the daughter of his best friend Theo, played with characteristic depth and power by Thomas Bo Larsen, who you might remember from such films as Festen, Vinterberg’s Dogme ‘95 effort, where he played an obnoxious racist to perfection.
We see Theo’s troubled and argumentative relationship with his wife and how this alienates and depressed his young daughter. We see her developing a sweet friendship with Lucas as he walks her to school while her parents are arguing. We see Lucas living alone, hoping to gain custody of his son from the ex-wife that refuses to talk to him. All of this takes place in that warmest and simultaneously grimmest of places, a tight-knit small town community.
When Lucas jilts the little girl’s offer of a heart, and chides her for kissing him inappropriately on the lips, she invents a story about him showing her his penis, basing her experience on porn shown to her by her older brother’s friend. Even after she comes clean about it being a lie, first to the head teacher and then to her mother, she is that she is merely repressing the memory and that she should not blame herself.
Whether it is the head teacher faced with such an accusation by a little girl who doesn’t realise the implications of what she’s saying, the best friend grieving and raging over his disbelief at the betrayal, the community closing ranks and violently shunning Lucas, Lucas’s nascent relationship with a co-worker and his rejection of her when she questions whether he actually committed the act or not, Vinterberg ruthlessly forces us to see everyone’s side of the story. It is with mounting dread as we see Lucas’s relationship with the little girl lay the foundation for his undoing and horror as she accuses him. Our disgust at the ease with which his boss and co-workers destroy him is tinged however with understanding - how many head teachers would be willing to risk leaving a possible paedophile in charge of a class of nursery children? How many investigators would immediately see through the simple lie of a cherubic little girl? It is only with the immaculately constructed third-person-omniscient that we know what is really going on, and this burdens the audience with the emotional charge of the situation as well as the underlying realisation that there really are no bad people, just good people reacting naturally to bad things.
Every parent who acts out at Lucas makes us indignant only because we know he is innocent, but by seeing their grief as well as their actions we understand that acting any differently would require an almost angelic level of self-control and willingness to inquire. His best friend turning on him when he needs someone to believe him and get it nipped in the bud is as raw as a scene can get because we understand where both of them are coming from. Lucas’s girlfriend is exposed to the accusations at work and naturally brings them home, which in turn is obviously one betrayal too far for Lucas, drowning as he is under the waves of scorn and rejection from everyone around him.
It is a truly brilliant achievement in storytelling, and a brave choice by the filmmakers to place the audience in this awkward and unyielding position. This film requires our compassion because we suffer with every member of the community, even the little girl who tries repeatedly to recant and has her words snatched away by adults with understandable concerns for her welfare.
There is even a point part way through the film where as an audience member you begin to doubt Lucas as well. Maybe there’s something we won’t find out until later, you find yourself thinking. Maybe he did do it, but we just haven’t seen it. Thankfully, Vinterberg doesn’t try to shoehorn in any nihilistic twists along those lines, and in a way the film is all the more powerful for it. As Lucas finally gets through to his best friend, and the daughter confesses to her father that it was all a lie, we realise that even we doubted him, and this makes us feel implicated in the actions of the community. A masterful piece of work indeed.
And the final moments of the film, when an unidentified fellow hunter fires a warning shot just next to Lucas’s head as if to tell him that his acquittal by the police does not equate with forgiveness from the townspeople, are earth-shattering. That symbol of the Rubicon of human relationships, where we cross a line with one another that can never be redressed or undone, is a stark reminder for all of us who idealise that type of closeness and community. In a pinch, people choose sides, and the sides they choose become fortresses over time from which not even authority or truth can free them. People may initially turn on Lucas because they believe he has done something wrong, but when they are told that it is in fact they who have done wrong, they retrench rather than re-assess.
In this film, Vinterberg forces us to be objective viewers and by doing so exposes us to the full frailty human decisions based on ideals of justice. Brutal and at the same time understated, The Hunt is a true tour de force and a perfect example of the power of the omniscient narrative.
And that’s the movie you probably (hopefully) saw.
