The Hunt

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repeat
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The Hunt

#1 Post by repeat » Tue Mar 26, 2013 1:29 pm

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THE LIE IS SPREADING

Alongside Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg (Festen, Far From the Madding Crowd) is one of Danish cinema’s finest modern exports. Perhaps his greatest film, The Hunt, is a sublimely orchestrated exercise in tension which features a tour-de-force central performance from Mads Mikkelsen (Rogue One, Casino Royale), who was awarded Best Actor at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for his performance.

Mikkelsen is Lukas, a recently-divorced primary school teacher locked in an acrimonious custody battle over his teenage son but just as his fortunes begin to change with the arrival of a new love his world is torn apart by an innocent lie. Persecuted by his local community, accusations escalate and Lukas soon faces unanimous condemnation from everyone around him, including his closest friends.

Featuring a stellar supporting cast from Danish Film and TV’s finest including Thomas Bo Larsen (Pusher), Anne Louise Hassing (The Idiots) and Susse Wold (Unit 1), The Hunt, eschews the rules of Vinterberg and his colleagues’ filmmaking manifesto Dogme95 for one of the most beautifully photographed and perfectly scripted films in recent years.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS:
• High Definition digital transfer
• Original 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and 2.0 stereo options
• Optional English subtitles
• The Making of ‘The Hunt’ - featuring director Thomas Vinterberg and star Mads Mikkelsen
• Deleted and extended scenes
• Alternate ending
• Outtakes
• Original trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options

FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Booklet featuring new writing on the film and a contemporary interview with Thomas Vinterberg, illustrated with original production stills.

DVD SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS:
• High Definition digital transfer
• Original 5.1 surround sound audio and 2.0 stereo options
• Optional English subtitles
• The Making of ‘The Hunt’ - featuring director Thomas Vinterberg and star Mads Mikkelsen
• Deleted and extended scenes
• Alternate ending
• Outtakes
• Original trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options

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zedz
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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#2 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 26, 2013 3:24 pm

repeat wrote:Well, if Vinterberg's much maligned post-Festen output has prompted some to write him off as a lost promise, do yourselves a favour: forget about those and go see The Hunt. I understand it's been widely hailed as a return to form; be that as it may (can't comment as I haven't seen the supposedly bad ones), I dare say this is a Very Good Film, albeit one that a lot of people will probably dislike. I had several problems with it myself, but the sheer power of the film made me gradually forget about them - and on reflection, I think what is achieved here justifies the means.

The film basically sets up a situation, hammers it into place in with rapidly accelerating and uncompromising absurdity (and I predict this part will lead many to condemn it as unrealistic, or contrived, or manipulative), then proceeds to build in intensity - not steadily, more like a rollercoaster - towards the inevitable climax; but the real masterstroke is the epilogue, ending on a definitive shot that I can't bring myself to call anything less than masterful. It's an intense experience, with plenty of uncomfortable/uncontrollable laughs and general physical discomfort: a dogged sense of purpose, confident direction (never putting a foot wrong in a veritable minefield of risky subject matter) and Mads Mikkelsen's pitch-perfect performance secure its place in my 2012 top ten. It's beautifully photographed and appropriately scored as well. Don't miss it!

(I know this hasn't opened yet in the States, but if I've understood correctly it's going to - and for those who can't wait, it's out now on DVD/BD in the UK)
This film was very well done but (as you predicted) it got so over-egged that I was thrown out of it about half way through.

For me, it was the same old problem that plagues so many films: characters doing whatever they need to do to artificially ramp up the tension and drama, however idiotic or out of character. Like, if a child accused you of molesting her, don't you think your best possible course of action would be
SpoilerShow
to try and contrive some 'quality time' alone with her so you can have a good chat about it? No way that could backfire, right?
Although I don't think Mads Mikkelson should be persecuted for a heinous act he didn't commit, at that point I decided he should be persecuted for being such a fucking idiot, so the mechanics of the film completely broke down for me.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#3 Post by repeat » Tue Mar 26, 2013 5:56 pm

zedz wrote:For me, it was the same old problem that plagues so many films: characters doing whatever they need to do to artificially ramp up the tension and drama, however idiotic or out of character.
This is a hell of an interesting topic actually - I think it has partly to do with genre expectations. Unfathomable/unmotivated actions or "unbelievable" characters would indeed be a problem in a heavily plot-based film, but I suspect that Vinterberg was going for something different here.

I did feel skeptical during the setup, because I wasn't sure what kind of a film this was going to be: expecting a realistic "problem picture", the extremity and absurdity with which the relationship between the protagonist and the villagers was established and hammered home took me totally by surprise, made me sit up and realize that maybe that's not where the film was going at all. And it wasn't - at least for me it was more allegorical than realistic: and whenever that seems to be the case, I'm always willing to turn off my plothole detectors. (Some of my favourite films hang totally on seemingly unfathomable actions or plotholes, that raise questions like "why don't they just do this-and-this" - but the answer is always: because in that case there wouldn't be a movie)

I'm definitely not saying that's the right way to view this, indeed it might be that I'm reading too much into the film and covering up its faults, but anyway that's how it worked for me!

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#4 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 26, 2013 6:04 pm

I can see what you mean, but I think the film would have needed to go much deeper into the surreally nightmarish to realize that kind of Kafkaesque vision (which is indeed a filmmaking mode that I like and would have worked well for this film). And I must confess that I'm hyper-sensitive to lazy plotting in basically realistic films. If unbelievable relationships and reactions in the context of an issue-fuelled thriller were at all unusual, I might be more prepared to concede that Vinterberg was deliberately opting out of realism in this instance.
Last edited by zedz on Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#5 Post by repeat » Wed Mar 27, 2013 3:26 am

Fair enough - it's true that it never really goes into explicitly surreal nightmare territory, but on the other hand I enjoyed that ambiguity... I think we can safely predict that the film will divide audiences pretty much along these lines, and to each their own! Will be interesting to hear what others think when it hits the screens in the US.

I was reading some interviews with Vinterberg to see if anyone had questioned any of the absurdities, but rather disappointingly they're all very polite and obsessed with the same boring and obvious questions (subject matter, career history). However a couple of the problems that bothered me initially were briefly touched upon: he admits that a) they did everything possible (to the extent of choosing camera angles) in order to keep the protagonist undoubtably innocent ("I found it less interesting with the ambiguity. It's almost a convention in filmmaking... it was a challenge, fighting against this"); b) they purposefully exaggerated the reactions of society and officials "to be able to create drama... the police, nowadays, would never do anything like it does in the film"; and c) those reactions are irrational, but not unrealistic (he says the real-life incidents were much worse), and furthermore necessary because he wanted to make "a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of evil spreading like a virus".

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#6 Post by rs98762001 » Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:10 pm

Zedz is spot on. This is incredulous, predictable, and ham-fisted. I was willing to give Vinterberg the benefit of the doubt on this one, but he just keeps disappointing over and over again. Festen really seems like a miracle now.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#7 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:25 am

rs98762001 wrote:This is incredulous, predictable, and ham-fisted.
Yes, it is all three of those things (as I believe I've outlined above), but how is that in contradiction with what the film is trying (and I think succeeds) to achieve?

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#8 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Mar 28, 2013 6:37 am

I lost this one too after about 20 mins partially because of the reasons given by repeat and zedz regarding the improbability of the hero's actions to drive the plot and of the complete lack of ambiguity in his make up.
SpoilerShow
Similarly the seeds of the accusation being graphically sown by the little girl's older brother.
But perhaps more than this was the very simple fact that we have the most handsome man in Denmark who is irredeemably innocent being hounded and ostracized by a band of lard-ass, boorish, beer swilling, shaggy (straw) dogs. Isn't this why we have video games to serve this sort of purpose?
'Deliverance from the Straw Trolls' might work quite well. I'm working on it now.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#9 Post by TMDaines » Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:35 pm

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:But perhaps more than this was the very simple fact that we have the most handsome man in Denmark who is irredeemably innocent being hounded and ostracized by a band of lard-ass, boorish, beer swilling, shaggy (straw) dogs. Isn't this why we have video games to serve this sort of purpose?
'Deliverance from the Straw Trolls' might work quite well. I'm working on it now.
Did we watch a different film? It was just him and the rest of the men in the village, who he got on well with, no? We saw them all drinking beer and having a laugh together.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#10 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:12 pm

TMDaines wrote:
NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:But perhaps more than this was the very simple fact that we have the most handsome man in Denmark who is irredeemably innocent being hounded and ostracized by a band of lard-ass, boorish, beer swilling, shaggy (straw) dogs. Isn't this why we have video games to serve this sort of purpose?
'Deliverance from the Straw Trolls' might work quite well. I'm working on it now.
Did we watch a different film? It was just him and the rest of the men in the village, who he got on well with, no? We saw them all drinking beer and having a laugh together.
No we didn't see different films. How does him sharing a beer at first invalidate what I wrote?
I said after 20 mins.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#11 Post by TMDaines » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:17 pm

Because he was one of these same men: a group of blokes. Only after what happened did he become an outsider from the rest of them. You've described the characters as there being a clean cut, handsome angel and a bunch of lager louts, who are poles apart and stand in complete opposition to each other. The film doesn't depict this at all. The film depicts how the dynamics of a village and close knit community change drammatically after a (false) accusation, and not a good man being incessantly hounded by a group of evil men.
Last edited by TMDaines on Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#12 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:19 pm

That's why I said "after 20 minutes".

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#13 Post by TMDaines » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:21 pm

So what's your point. What does the film do wrong? What should it do?

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#14 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:24 pm

TMDaines wrote:So what's your point. What does the film do wrong? What should it do?
Try harder.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#15 Post by TMDaines » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:33 pm

I don't understand. You made a criticism of the film, which I responded to, saying that I disagreed with your assessment of it and explaining why. Now you don't wish to simply elaborate on it and explain what you think the film did wrong and explain how it should have portrayed the characters?

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#16 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:40 pm

TMDaines wrote:You made a criticism of the film, which I responded to
Apart from myself I haven't seen anyone in this thread make a criticism of this film yet, just stating personal preferences.

I don't want to repeat myself (sic) but honestly I think y'all are missing the boat here. Misreading the films intentions and unwilling to engage with its complexity, and thus unable to criticize it on its own terms, you're limited to expressing a personal distaste for its mechanism of action. It's like saying that Einstein on the Beach is a piece of shit because there's too much repetition.

Consider this. Vinterberg has stated in interviews that the lack of ambiguity is entirely intended, and that the handsome and charismatic Mikkelsen was cast specifically to maximize viewers' empathy towards the protagonist (he noticed in his research that most of the real-life victims were people who were considered unattractive and weird by their community, and felt he needed to go against that tendency). All the actions by all the characters drive towards one single goal: to maximize the conflict between the protagonist and his environment. "Improbability" and "incredulity" don't even enter into this: the action derives from the preset trajectory of the story, which it's not a fault in the film but the very mechanism by which is reaches what it's going for. It is NOT intended to be a realistic issue-driven drama, even though it might look like it at first - it becomes increasingly clear from the second act onwards (at which point the viewer unable to shift their perspective decides it's a ridiculous and unrealistic issue-driven drama and tunes out) that what we have here is a highly allegorical fairytale of naïve, innocent good, absolute irrational evil, suffering and redemption - and like a Grimm brothers tale, it achieves its goal by being purposefully grotesque, overblown and heavy-handed. You don't have to like it, but you'd make a better case against it if you tried to tackle it first.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#17 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:55 pm

repeat wrote: what we have here is a highly allegorical fairytale of naïve, innocent good, absolute irrational evil, suffering and redemption - and like a Grimm brothers tale, it achieves its goal by being purposefully grotesque, overblown and heavy-handed. You don't have to like it, but you'd make a better case against it if you tried to tackle it first.
And if one tackles it and finds it reductive and 'heavy-handed' do we have to laud it as having achieved its purported goal simply to prove we have "tackled it" rather than trust our (critical) instincts?

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#18 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:02 pm

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:a band of lard-ass, boorish, beer swilling, shaggy (straw) dogs
TMDaines wrote:Did we watch a different film? It was just him and the rest of the men in the village, who he got on well with, no?
No you didn't, but he stopped watching it 20 minutes in. But what is said here hits right into the emotional core of the film: we KNOW the guy is innocent, and our sense of justice forces us to identify with his plight, but that identification necessarily aligns us against his persecutors. Notice that there is nothing in the film (apart from their eventual increasingly violent actions) that suggest these people are boorish, stupid or evil; but we begin to view them as such as a result of their actions which to us seem evil (although to them they are justified, even heroic). That's where the film succeeds in making (to paraphrase Rorty) a hole in the real world - made by our real hate towards these good-intentioned people who only strive to protect their loved ones from (real or imagined) evil. (Vinterberg: "I consider them all good. I find that they're all innocent, sweet, and pure people who have this splinter in the eye that takes away their innocence").

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#19 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:09 pm

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:
repeat wrote: what we have here is a highly allegorical fairytale of naïve, innocent good, absolute irrational evil, suffering and redemption - and like a Grimm brothers tale, it achieves its goal by being purposefully grotesque, overblown and heavy-handed. You don't have to like it, but you'd make a better case against it if you tried to tackle it first.
And if one tackles it and finds it reductive and 'heavy-handed' do we have to laud it as having achieved its purported goal simply to prove we have "tackled it" rather than trust our (critical) instincts?
No but a statement of taste is not a critical judgment! You can say you didn't like it, or that you don't agree with what it's trying to do, but you can't say it fails if you can't point out the flaws that impede it from achieving its goals. For example, Funny Games succeeds in its (admittedly low) goal - to repulse the people that "didn't need to see it" (Haneke) - and even if I don't like it, or I don't think it a worthy goal for a film, I still can't say it sucks because it does very fucking well what it was built to do.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#20 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:12 pm

I didn't 'stop watching' after 20 minutes but it lost my engagement. Far from identifying with this innocent I found it cloying and reductive. Let's just agree that yes we did see different films. I saw the one without the Vinterberg crib sheet/manifesto so I couldn't give it points for 'job done'. And when did 'intentionality' demand so much creedence to reception theory?

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#21 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:18 pm

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:I didn't 'stop watching' after 20 minutes but it lost my engagement. Far from identifying with this innocent I found it cloying and reductive. Let's just agree that yes we did see different films. I saw the one without the Vinterberg crib sheet/manifesto so I couldn't give it points for 'job done'. And when did 'intentionality' demand so much creedence to reception theory?
You're right, I'm sorry, I'm getting carried away - it's just a pet peeve of mine when the author's intentions get trampled under all kinds of subjective judgments. For the record, I hadn't read anything at all about the film beforehand, and I was thrown by probably exactly the same bits as you, but for some reason or another instead of becoming disengaged I started to find it much more interesting and engaging than what it first seemed it was going to be.

All this shit began bothering me only after the film had ended and continued to resonate in various unpleasant ways. I couldn't articulate it at all immediately afterwards, not to mention during it (and I've only seen it once), so it's not like I was watching it through some high-flown theory of what it was supposed to be or do. It grabbed me by the balls and I'm trying to understand why (and also why others weren't similarly affected), that's my only horse in this race.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#22 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:46 pm

repeat wrote:I still can't say it sucks because it does very fucking well what it was built to do.
Yes, you can. A film can achieve exactly what it set out to do and still be terrible.

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#23 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 5:26 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
repeat wrote:I still can't say it sucks because it does very fucking well what it was built to do.
Yes, you can. A film can achieve exactly what it set out to do and still be terrible.
I don't want to steer this further off-topic as I only wanted to compare impressions of this particular film, but you're right of course: a film can achieve exactly what it set out to do and be morally questionable (for example a piece of propaganda) - but to call something "terrible" because it doesn't conform to one's personal preferences is useless, and to say that something "fails" because it fails to please oneself is just plain wrong.

Anyway I think it's fairly settled now that the chosen mode of presentation of this film turns a lot of people off - but I hope that some of those who haven't seen it yet will adjust their expectations accordingly, because there might be something in there waiting to be discovered...

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#24 Post by TMDaines » Thu Mar 28, 2013 5:48 pm

repeat wrote:
TMDaines wrote:You made a criticism of the film, which I responded to
Apart from myself I haven't seen anyone in this thread make a criticism of this film yet, just stating personal preferences.
How is someone stating that they lost interest after twenty minutes, and then giving the reasons why, not a criticism of the film? Surely, a film should be attempting to hold your attention for its entirety?

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Re: The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

#25 Post by repeat » Thu Mar 28, 2013 6:15 pm

TMDaines wrote:How is someone stating that they lost interest after twenty minutes, and then giving the reasons why, not a criticism of the film? Surely, a film should be attempting to hold your attention for its entirety?
Well, you asked him what he expected the film to be doing, and he said "try harder", while I'm suggesting that a film might actually be asking the viewer to try harder.

It's no use debating this on a general level, but personally I tend to mark down my failure to engage with a film as my own fault and not of the film (unless it says "directed by Paolo Sorrentino"). I think criticism should approach a work on its own terms and try to figure out how it works, instead of passing judgements based on personal taste. I know it sounds kind of weird, but I usually assume that a released work constitutes a successful representation of the author's intentions, and I try approach them accordingly.

I would have no issue at all with the points raised about The Hunt if I only found it convincing that Vinterberg was trying to make a believable issue-driven drama and couldn't keep himself from destroying it with a truckload of over-egged, incredulous and reductive absurdities. But the apparently very deliberate choices in the structure and tone of the film (discussed by himself in interviews) seem to support a different interpretation. I don't know if his career history has to do with this readiness to accept the first hypothesis, maybe I would've viewed it differently if I had been negatively biased but I haven't seen those films where he apparently really did fail.

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