10 / 10
Official trailer
A Small Town
Lucas lives in a small Danish village where everybody knows everybody. He’s recently divorced, working as an assistant at the local kindergarten after the school he taught at closed, and he’s fighting for more time with his teenage son. The children adore him. He plays with them, lets them tackle him in the playground, walks them home and ties their shoelaces. He goes hunting with the men of the village, drinks with them and belongs.
His best friend is Theo, and Theo’s little daughter, Klara, is especially fond of Lucas. She’s a lonely, imaginative child with parents who argue, and Lucas is kind to her. One day, hurt because he gently rejects a small gift and a childish kiss from her, she tells the kindergarten’s head a lie, a vague story built from something her older brother showed her.
Thomas Vinterberg directed it in 2012, co-writing with Tobias Lindholm, and the century has produced few more harrowing films, a film that never shows anything graphic and still leaves you shaken.
I found this film almost unbearable, and I wouldn’t dream of rating it lower than a 10.
Nothing in it is shocking in the usual sense. What wrecks me is how ordinary everyone is. Every person who helps destroy Lucas thinks they’re protecting children, and I could picture myself making half their mistakes. That frightened me more than any monster movie has.
The Lie Spreads
The kindergarten head takes Klara’s story seriously, as she’s supposed to. She calls in an expert, who interviews the child with leading questions, and Klara, confused and eager to please, says yes to things that never happened. The head suspends Lucas without telling him exactly what he’s accused of, and she tells the parents. Soon other children, prompted by worried parents, are describing things too.
The film is terrifyingly precise about how this happens. Nobody’s evil. Everybody’s frightened and trying to protect children, and each reasonable step makes the lie bigger and harder to undo. By the time Klara tries to take it back, nobody will listen. They assume she’s in denial. The film understands that once a community has decided what happened, even the truth sounds like a lie.
The interview with the expert makes my skin crawl. Every question hands Klara the answer the expert is fishing for, and she’s a little girl who only wants the grown-ups to be pleased with her. I wanted to reach into the screen and stop it.
For Writers
The lie grows through reasonable, well-meaning steps. Nobody’s a villain, and the injustice happens anyway.
The most frightening stories about injustice often have no villain at all. When ordinary people make understandable choices that add up to catastrophe, the reader can’t blame one person, and has to recognize how easily they might have done the same.
Vinterberg shows every step: the careful teacher, the expert with leading questions, the frightened parents. Each is defensible on its own. Together, they’re a machine for destroying a man, and the audience sees the machine as it’s built. That’s far more frightening than any single monster, because the reader recognizes every part of it.
Mads Mikkelsen
Mads Mikkelsen plays Lucas, and it’s the finest performance of his career. That’s saying a great deal. He won best actor at Cannes for it. Lucas is gentle, patient and decent, a man who can’t believe what’s happening and keeps assuming the truth will come out.
As the town turns on him, Mikkelsen shows him bewildered, then humiliated, then furious and finally hollowed out. He barely raises his voice, and his quiet, wounded dignity makes the injustice unbearable. There’s a moment in a supermarket, where Lucas is refused service and beaten, and simply goes back in for his groceries, that’s as brave as screen acting gets.
Mikkelsen is the biggest reason this gets a perfect score. Plenty of actors playing wronged men beg the audience for pity, and he never asks for it once. He keeps his manners and his temper, and I end up doing the suffering for him. That hurts a good deal more.
For Writers
Lucas barely raises his voice as his life is destroyed around him. His restraint makes the injustice far more painful to watch.
A wronged character who stays controlled can be far more affecting than one who rages and weeps at every turn. The reader feels the anger the character is holding back, and the pressure builds with every scene until it’s almost unbearable. When the character finally breaks, as Lucas does in the church, the moment is overwhelming because the reader has waited so long for it. Restraint is a way of storing emotional power for when it’s needed most. Spend it too early and the big scene has nothing left to draw on.
Theo
Thomas Bo Larsen plays Theo, Lucas’s best friend and Klara’s father, and his performance is devastating too. He wants to believe Lucas. He’s known him for years. But his daughter has said something terrible, and the whole town is telling him children don’t lie.
Theo is caught between loyalty and fear, and the film makes his choice painfully understandable. The friendship between the two men, shattered by a child’s lie, is the film’s broken heart. Late in the film, Theo overhears Klara saying Lucas did nothing, and his face, caught between relief, guilt and fear, is as complicated as anything in the film. He’s the man who could end the nightmare with a word, and he can’t quite bring himself to say it.
Klara
Annika Wedderkopp plays Klara, and she’s superb, a small child who tells a lie without understanding it and then can’t make anybody hear the truth. The film never blames her. She’s a lonely little girl who said something she didn’t understand, and the adults did the rest.
Vinterberg is careful and responsible with her scenes, and the film never exploits her or the subject. The horror is entirely in the adults’ reactions, in their fear and their terrible certainty.
Marcus
Lucas’s teenage son, Marcus, played by Lasse Fogelstrøm, stands by his father when almost nobody else will. He comes to stay with him, confronts the townspeople and pleads with Theo. His loyalty is the one bright thing left in Lucas’s life, and the film makes you fear for him every time he stands up for his father. When the town strikes at Lucas through his son, and through his beloved dog, the film becomes almost too painful to watch. Vinterberg doesn’t hold back, and he doesn’t need to show much. The implications are enough.
Christmas Eve
The film’s great climactic scene takes place at the Christmas Eve service in the village church. Lucas, bruised and exhausted, walks in and sits among the people who’ve ostracized him. The children sing. And then Lucas walks up to Theo, stares into his eyes and demands that he look at him and see the truth. Modern cinema has few scenes this powerful: raw, dignified and completely devastating. Mikkelsen doesn’t shout. He just refuses to be ignored, and for a moment, the whole church has to face what it’s done. I’d put the church scene up against anything in modern cinema. I held my breath through the whole scene. After an hour of watching Lucas swallow every insult, seeing him finally plant himself in front of Theo and refuse to be looked past is the payoff I’d been desperate for, and Vinterberg makes every second of it count.
A Year Later
The film ends a year later. Things seem to have healed, at least on the surface. Lucas has been cleared, his friendship with Theo has resumed, and his son is old enough to join the village hunt. The community welcomes Lucas back, and everybody acts as if nothing happened.
Then, out in the woods, during the hunt, an unseen shooter fires a shot near Lucas. He’s not hit. The shooter disappears. It’s a chilling, perfect ending. The lie has been officially disproved, and it will never go away. Somebody in this village still believes it, and always will.
It’s the right ending, and it chilled me more than anything before it. A lesser film would have stopped at the reconciliation and sent everybody home warm. Vinterberg gives us that, lets us relax for a minute, and then puts a bullet near Lucas from somewhere in the trees.
For Writers
A shot is fired at Lucas a full year after he’s cleared. The lie is disproved, and its damage never really ends.
An ending that shows a wound still open, even after the official resolution has been reached, can be truer and more haunting than a happy one. It tells the reader that some harms can’t be undone, however much everybody wants to move on. The unseen shooter matters enormously. Vinterberg never reveals who it is, because it could be anybody in the hunting party, any of the men Lucas calls his friends. That anonymity turns one gunshot into a verdict on the whole village, and on every village like it.
The Title
The Danish title, Jagten, means the hunt, and it works on several levels. Lucas is a hunter, part of a village tradition of men going into the woods together. When the accusation spreads, he becomes the hunted, and the villagers become a pack.
The deer that appear throughout the film, watched through rifle sights, reflect Lucas’s situation, a gentle creature stalked by people who’ve decided to kill it. Vinterberg never pushes the symbolism, but it gives the film a quiet, mythic undertow.
The Mirror of Festen
Vinterberg made his name in 1998 with Festen, a Dogme 95 film about a family celebration where a son stands up and accuses his father of abusing him as a child, and the family refuses to believe him. The accusation in Festen is true, and nobody listens.
The Hunt turns that story inside out. Here the accusation is false, and everybody believes it.
Taken together, the two films make a powerful pair, both about the terrible difficulty communities have in facing the truth about abuse, whether that means refusing to hear a real victim or refusing to hear an innocent man. Vinterberg doesn’t take sides. He shows how certainty, in either direction, can destroy lives.
The Supermarket
The supermarket scene is the moment the film’s quiet dread turns into open violence. Lucas goes to buy food and is told he’s no longer welcome. When he refuses to leave without his groceries, the butcher and the staff beat him and throw him out into the car park.
He picks himself up, walks back in, bleeding, and headbutts the butcher, and then he collects his groceries and leaves. That small, stubborn act of dignity is the first time Lucas fights back. The audience, who’ve been holding their breath for an hour, almost cheer.
Autumn Light
Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s cinematography gives the village a soft, beautiful look: golden autumn woods, candlelit homes, frost and snow. The village is a lovely, cozy place, full of friendship, tradition and warmth, and that’s what makes the violence so shocking. The prettiness of the setting never changes, even as the community inside it turns ugly. Vinterberg uses the seasons carefully, moving from autumn to Christmas to the following year, and the natural, understated style makes everything feel real. Nothing about the film feels staged.
Hard and Necessary
It’s very hard to watch The Hunt. It’s slow, painful and relentless, and it gives almost no relief. Some viewers find it too upsetting, and its subject will be difficult for anybody affected by abuse or false accusation. Nobody should go into it expecting comfort. It’s also an essential film of its decade, a precise, compassionate, terrifying study of how fear, certainty and community can destroy an innocent man. It deserves every bit of its reputation.
Craft Note
Craft Note
In The Hunt, a community convicts an innocent man without a trial, one reasonable fear at a time. There’s no villain, only frightened people, and the film makes the audience feel how easily they might join the mob.
Stories about injustice hit hardest when they implicate the reader as well as the characters.
If you write about a group turning on someone, show each person’s reasons clearly enough that the reader can imagine sharing them.
What makes The Hunt (2012) work?
I give The Hunt a 10 because I can’t find a false note anywhere in it. Mikkelsen gives the performance of his career, Vinterberg never cheats by handing us a villain, and that last gunshot in the woods leaves the wound open where it belongs. It’s miserable to sit through, and I’d still press it on anyone who can stomach it, because it shows exactly how decent people turn into a mob.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Best Actor Award, Festival de Cannes
- Three Danish films receive Oscar nomination, Danish Film Institute
- The Hunt (2012), IMDb
