It is 14 years since Thomas Vinterberg burst into view with his excoriating family drama Festen, which launched the minimalist Dogme movement and became a much-talked-about cultural phenomenon on its own account. After that, he appeared to lose his touch, and his admirers wondered if he could recover that early mastery (although I was a fan of his 2010 film Submarino).
Well, Vinterberg really has come storming back with this new movie, easily his best since Festen, and a reminder of his superb gift for unsettling collective drama: it is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance. The theme is admittedly familiar, and so is the implied analysis of what is going on, and yet Vinterberg endows it with such urgency and his superbly constructed script, co-written with Tobias Lindholm, is a screenplay masterclass, completely upending your expectations as how the climactic scene is going to play out.
The lead performance from Mads Mikkelsen is outstanding: he is Lucas, a teacher who's having to work temporarily as a kindergarten assistant due to a school closure, recently divorced, but with many good friends in a close-knit community, and a cheerful participant in all the local traditions, chiefly an annual deer hunt. But things go horribly wrong for Lucas when an accusation is made against him by a child, and the situation escalates out of control.
The Hunt has hints of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Von Trier's Dogville in its portrayal of group hysteria, with its remorseless anti-logic. But of course it returns to the themes of Festen: how family and community, supposedly the bulwarks against chaos and unhappiness, can turn in on themselves. Mikkelsen's performance is entirely convincing and all too plausible; and with him at its centre, The Hunt becomes an unbearably tense drama-thriller. A scene in a supermarket is gripping, and so is Lucas's appearance at the Christmas Eve church service, which can really only be watched through your fingers.
That hunt, and the weaponry used, call to mind Chekhov's dictum about what must happen to a gun which is produced in the first act: but actually, what happens is much more interesting and complex; Lucas's final encounter with his accuser, and the final moments of the film, really are gripping. The film is perhaps open to some plausibility niggles: would not Lucas have engaged a lawyer, or been advised to do so, at some stage? Well perhaps not. Someone in his situation might simply be too stunned to defend his interests, or he could suspect that any such action would be an admission of guilt.
There really isn't ounce of fat on this picture, and the cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Cristensen is ravishingly good. Mikkelsen, an actor still perhaps best known as the Bond villain in Casino Royale, shows just how excellent a performer he is.
