Tell me a story

The Hunt is sad. The Hunt is frustrating. The Hunt will wring out all the joy from your heart, leaving you feeling powerless, achy, and depressed. Or at least that was my experience. The film tells the story of kindergarten teacher Lucas (played by Mads Mikkelsen) who is falsely accused of sexually abusing one of his students. Falsely accused. We know this for a fact. But other than Lucas and the student, we are the only ones who know this. He lives in a small town in Denmark, and so it’s not long before all his friends and neighbors hear the rumors. Boy does your grocery shopping experience change when everyone in the store thinks you’re a pedophile.

Before the accusations, Lucas lived a simple life with simple pleasures. He had a steady job, a son, Marcus (played by Lasse Fogelstrom), who adored him, a faithful dog, a set of close friends, and a budding romance with a coworker, Nadja (played by Alexandra Rapaport). Sure he also had an ex-wife who hated him, and sure he’d only become a kindergarten teacher because he was let go from his job as secondary school teacher, but the positives in his life outweighed the negatives until just like that, without doing anything wrong, the balance shifted. Then one by one all the good things in his life start to fall apart. I haven’t even mentioned that the alleged victim, Klara (played adorably by Annika Wedderkopp), is the daughter of Lucas’s very best friend, Theo (played by Thomas Bo Larsen). What is a man to do in this situation?

It is so incredibly hard to watch Lucas deal with all the hate and disgust he encounters. Too hard. The story overloaded the capacity of my sympathies to the point where I found my mind pulling itself out of the movie because I couldn’t handle all the emotion I was feeling. In those moments I instead questioned why filmmakers, Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, would want to make the audience feel so bad. I couldn’t figure out what any of us got out of watching a man being repeatedly kicked while he was down. It actually angered me, and even after mulling it over, I haven’t been able to adequately explain why, though I have some ideas.

Lucas

First is that the movie made me feel powerless. I wanted badly to help Lucas, but of course I could do nothing but watch him take his unwarranted abuse. I didn’t like feeling so strongly and being unable to act on that feeling. After all, the clenched fist lives to strike.

Second is that I felt manipulated. It’s so easy to make an audience feel sad. Take a likable person, make bad things happen to him, and voila, there’s your sadness. Vinterberg and Lindholm chose to tell a story that is poignant by its very nature. I knew this going in. The problem only arises when the gloom and misery become unrelenting, when it feels like the events taking place exist solely to make us feel bad for the character. I liken The Hunt to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: endless torture and no joy.

All this is not to say that The Hunt is bad. It’s actually a good film—well-made and well-acted—and it explores sexual abuse from a very interesting angle. We haven’t seen the viewpoint of the falsely accused much in film. From this perspective we can see that sometimes the accuser and the accused both end up being the victims, and sometimes our szintentions to protect the weak can lead to an assault on the innocent. I also like the fact that there’s no real villain. If you hate anyone it’s Grethe (played by Susse Wold), the schoolkeeper who initiates the investigation, and while you can be mad at her in regards to how poorly she handles the situation, you can’t blame her for trying to protect a little girl. As a whole you can understand every single character’s motivation in the movie. That’s quite a feat, one that doesn’t occur in modern cinema as often as I would like.

Grethe and Kalara

No one’s motivations do you understand more cleary than Lucas’s. Mads plays him so well. As Lucas goes through this ordeal, his emotions go on a rollercoaster: from surprise to confusion to disbelief to anger to resignation to resolve, all of which you see on Mads’s face. Mads makes Lucas real and that makes his suffering so much more unbearable.

The setting is also quite remarkable. I’m not sure the name of the town is ever mentioned, but the film establishes a real sense of place. I almost felt like I was physically transported out of DC and into this Danish town. The movie opens with Lucas and a handful of his closest buddies having an outing at park where they skinny-dip in a lake. The camaraderie is palpable. You feel at home right away. In another scene the friends gather around a table in someone’s house, drinking beer and singing songs that they’ve probably been singing since childhood. There isn’t much space in the room, but it feels comfortable and warm, and not at all cramped. In fact whenever we go into a person’s house it feels cozy and lived in. That there is an atmosphere of warmth and security throughout the town, as well a sense of history, of lives lived out to completion. It’s the perfect place to set a story where the characters have to face such horrible fears.

While I’m heaping praise on the movie, I’d like to throw some Thomas Bo Larsen’s way. He is perhaps in the most difficult situation in the movie, torn between believing his best friend and his daughter. His face showed that inner conflict so well. I felt so much for him.

Lucas and Theo

So believe me, this movie is worth watching. It has a lot going for it. I just didn’t like the story, specifically the events in the story. Now had this movie been based on a true story I wouldn’t have had nearly as much an issue with it. In that instance I’d feel like I was learning something about real human nature. With The Hunt I’m too aware that someone made up these events and purposely dragged this guy through Hell, and I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to take from it all. I don’t need made up stories to show me how sad the world can be; I already know that. I want a little fun in my movies. Fascinating The Hunt is. Fun it ain’t.

My Rating

The Hunt
Director: Thomas Vinterberg (Dear Wendy, When a Man Comes Home, Submarino)
Writers: Tobias Lindholm (R, Submarino, A Hijacking) and Thomas Vinterberg (The Biggest Heroes, The Third Lie, When a Man Comes Home)