Partway through, I caught myself yelling at the screen in complete anger, which usually doesn’t happen during good movies. However, after you’re done watching and you cool down, the movie forces you to reevaluate what’s actually happened logically and objectively.
“The Hunt” is about how minor incidents can be blown out of proportion. It also shows how impressionable young children can be and how much power they can hold in certain situations. More importantly, “The Hunt” is about how these things can create a chain reaction that can practically ruin a person’s reputation and turn him or her into an outcast.
That person is Lucas (Mads Mikkelson), a lonely man who works at the local kindergarten in his small Danish community. One day, there’s a minor incident between Lucas and a kindergartener named Klara (Annika Wedderkop). Nothing serious actually happens, but thanks to Klara’s stubbornness, her impressionability and a little lie she tells to the head teacher Grethe (Susse Wold), things get out of control.
Grethe thinks Lucas has molested Klara and decides to warn the authorities and the parents. Without even trying to look closer into the situation, the parents and community members shun Lucas. He’s fired from the kindergarten, he isn’t allowed to shop at the grocery store and even his best friend, Theo (Thomas Bo Larson), who also happens to be Klara’s father, threatens him with death.
This is what causes my strong angry reaction: Vinterberg paints Lucas as a good man; we’re on his side. The kids at the kindergarten love him, and even though he’s divorced, he’s still a good father to his now-adolescent son. He didn’t molest Klara, and so it’s simply not fair that Lucas is being treated this way.
However, the reason why this movie invokes such a strong response is because you’re watching the entire movie unfold from an outsider’s perspective. You’ve seen the actual incident, but the other characters within the film haven’t. You know Lucas is a good man, but the others don’t.
When it comes to child molestation, it’s gut instinct to take the side of the child. In the case of Klara, Lucas sort of became a second father to her, someone she can trust. In a lot of real child-molestation cases, the perpetrators fit Lucas’ profile. There are no villains in “The Hunt,” just frightened people doing what they think is best. The fact that the movie forces you to examine all angles in a logical manner is the most fascinating aspect of the picture.
It also benefits from having a strong lead performance. Mikkelson has been in a few American movies (most notably the villain in “Casino Royal”) and currently plays the psychopath Hannibal Lector in NBC’s “Hannibal,” and he settles right in to the benevolent and non-threatening role of Lucas. His performance shows a wide range of emotions but isn’t over-the-top, and he does a lot of the acting through facial expressions.
At one point, he gets beat up by supermarket employees who tell him he can’t shop there anymore. As he’s limping away, with blood on his face, and with a look of such sadness and defeat on his face, it’s devastating.
Later on, during a Christmas Eve church service, he sits on a bench by himself surrounded by the whole town, and as he sees them looking at him and whispering to one another, he breaks down and causes a scene. It’s easily one of the most moving performances of the year.
Maybe Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm made Lucas too decent of a man. Maybe they should have given him some rough spots so we aren’t on his side the whole time.
But any movie that elicits such a strong initial reaction and then forces you to go back and examine it more closely from multiple angles is rare. And Vinterberg does it all without any melodrama — everything feels natural — which is even more of a rarity.
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