The Hunt - Jagten

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg

Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Anne Louise Hassing, Thomas Bo Larsen, Daniel Engstrup, Sebastian Bull Sarning, Susse Wold

Year: 2012

Country: Denmark, Sweden

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

At Rignano Flaminio - a country of ten thousand inhabitants near Rome Italy - the parents of about thirty children between four and five years old, all attending the Olga Rovere kindergarten, came to police to sue some people.

They accused – three women asylum-seekers, one of them husband, one school janitor, and a sinhalese gas station attendant - abuse children, their son.

An infamous, diabolical accusation. The judge will order the mass arrest of all defendants.

The indelible mark of being monsters is marked on them, denounced by the most infamous of the crimes: abuse minors.

Tests come exclusively from children's stories. Atrocious, infamous narratives. Listening to the boys had to be an association for satanic conspiracy. From their testimonies, the teachers during the kindergartens time, brought the children to home of one of them. Besides they added stories of torture, drug use, even satanic rituals with drunk blood and drawings of reverse crosses.

Everything happened during the day and during lessons.

Who kept checking the remaining students?

Some disappeared for hours from the classroom and nobody noticed?

Why did not families notice any inconvenience when they came home?

Travelled - in a group - in the teacher's car in the country's streets and no one noticed them?

No adult testimony was collected.

In the home there were no clues to the presence of children, cameras placed at school did not show anything strange, no video or computer files were never found again.

In 2012, in the judgement of the court of first instance, all were absolved because the fact does not exist, the jury considered children's tales are false, probably pronounced to support their parents.

But five years have passed, the defendants were in jail, afflicted as monsters, they had to move and it is not over, because there will be other sets of proceedings and the infamous mark is indelible. Despite the lack of evidence, people have the horrible question in their head: and if it was true?

I remembered this fact while watching The Hunt of the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, Dogma 95's follower.

Lucas is 42 years old. He is separated, he has an adolescent child eager to live with his father. After divorce problems he finds work in an asylum.

The beginning of the film predicts future misadventures and the arrival of drama.

Despite family problems, Lucas is happy. The first scene shows him with a group of friends while enjoying diving in the frozen water.

Even with the children has a great affinity, also the pupils gets on well with him.

Among the students there is Clara, the daughter of his best friend. She is a disadvantaged, she suffers greatly from the family's difficulties. It is described with a compulsive obsessive attitude, does not trample the lines marked in the street or in a floor. With Lucas there is a special feeling, and when the teacher rebukes her, Clara invented that she has been forced into sexual act with Lucas. Instead, she tells what she saw in a brother's porn magazine.

Clara tells a lie.

A simple jealousy lie is for the elderly teacher the basis on which to build a dishonourable charge.

"They do not lie", referring to the children, declares the teacher.

It is incredible: she has never heard a boy tell a lie.

The news spreads, the country believes in Clara and Lucas is the terrible monster. They avoided it, he is arrested. When he gets exonerated, because the judge understands the child's lies, people continue don't believe. For them he will always and in any case be a monster.

Thomas Vinterberg signed the Dogma 95 written with the leader Lars von Trier on the desire to restore the simplicity - without special effects - in the cinema. Although the trend has been dissolved, The Hunt maintains some rules typical of the document.

Long-shot sequence, simple long reverse shot, accompanied by genuine dialogues, essential and useful, plus a detailed and natural photography.

These elements increase the dramatic nature of history, setting in November; the month of hunting and falls of brown-colored leaves. There is a relationship between the nature of the remote Danish village and the character of Lucas.

The only artificial element is an accentuation of blacks in chiaroscuros.

There is also a reflection on the psychology. There is a bad attitude to consider it always right till creates an obsession and an exasperation, in every situation till to interpret the truth in the contrary: "your mind would prefer not to remember".

There is a scene with the psychologist who interviews Clara about the event. It is an alienated interrogation, because in the mind of the doctor, the thing has already been drawn. The little girl says what the doctor expects. The psychologist reaches his vanity, his job is finding maniacs, so accusing Lucas has been successful also it is not true. From here to mass psychosis it is just short steps.