The Hunt | Little White Lies

The Hunt

29 Nov 2012 / Released: 30 Nov 2012

A man in a checkered jacket embracing a young boy tightly outdoors.
A man in a checkered jacket embracing a young boy tightly outdoors.
3

Anticipation.

The long-in-the-wilderness Vinterberg gained a coveted Cannes competition slot with this latest drama.

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Enjoyment.

Mikkelsen’s performance aside, there’s barely a film here.

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In Retrospect.

Self-satisfied and deeply cynical.

Thomas Vinterberg’s study of a man wrong­ful­ly accused of child molesta­tion is extreme­ly pre­scient, if manip­u­la­tive in the extreme.

Com­ing across like a tawdry TV movie des­e­cra­tion of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 dra­ma, The Wrong Man, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt sees the genial, lib­er­al­ly mind­ed denizens of a leafy Dan­ish sub­urb trans­form into revolt­ing hate mon­gers at the mere whiff of social discord.

It’s a case of guilty until proven inno­cent for kind­ly nurs­ery school teacher Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), who is wrong­ful­ly accused by one of his pint-sized pups of some unsavoury extra-cur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ty. Wild, spu­ri­ous hunch­es trump basic ratio­nal­i­ty as Lucas is swift­ly ostracised from the com­mu­ni­ty while await­ing for­mal charges to con­firm to all that he is indeed a repug­nant sex pervert.

Oper­at­ing under the sup­posed tru­ism that adults will always take the words uttered by their chil­dren at face val­ue, Lucas’ crime’ drags him to the lev­el of brood­ing, Kaf­ka-esque pat­sy where­in, for rea­sons unknown, he refus­es to argue his case or offer an alibi.

Manip­u­la­tive in the extreme, Vinterberg’s film mas­quer­ades as sage social cri­tique when in fact it has all the psy­cho­log­i­cal cred­i­bil­i­ty of a cheap­jack soap opera. Its cen­tral glitch is that Lucas’ inno­cence is nev­er in doubt, and so the process of watch­ing the film is sim­ply a case of wait­ing until he’s absolved.

That the plot machi­na­tions of The Hunt don’t bare close scruti­ny is only part of the prob­lem: Vin­ter­berg has obvi­ous­ly worked close­ly with his cast to sculpt nat­u­ral­is­tic, free-flow­ing per­for­mances, and you’d be hard pressed to lam­bast Mikkelsen’s sto­ical cen­tral turn. But, alas, Vin­ter­berg has only suc­ceed­ed in cre­at­ing crude ciphers, not com­plex human characters.

The film’s hys­ter­i­cal chil­dren are evil’ cre­do is more pro­nounced and with­er­ing than even The Omen, and the man­ner in which it tack­les these issues is at best irre­spon­si­ble, at worst plain dan­ger­ous. It amounts to the very same alarmist tabloid balder­dash that it sup­pos­ed­ly decries.

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