Lasse Fogelstrøm and Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt

Realistic wildness

The Hunt is an effectively disturbing, though mostly predictable first-person account of false sexual abuse accusations in a Danish kindergarten, protagonist played by the soulful, charismatic and somewhat enigmatic Mads Mikkelsen. Return to agonizing form for the Dogme co-creator. Strong film: recommended. This melodrama is told with great force and economy. Its unpredictable edge of savagery is original, if its theme is not.

In Thomas Vinterberg's new film a divorced man seeking custody of his teenage son is the helpless victim of a little girl's vague accusation of sexual abuse, which quickly spreads to the whole school and then the town's seeing him as a monster preying on all the kids. The real victim is the man, Lukas (Mikkelsen), who has just found a girlfriend (Alexandra Rapaport), a foreign woman who's a new coworker, and discovered his son wants to come live with him, when his world crashes down. The accusation is vague, a gesture of sudden pique. Little Klara ((Annika Wedderkopp)) has a childish crush on him and when she's kissed him on the mouth -- making her the inappropriate one -- he has politely rebuffed her. (Some of his rolling around on the floor with the kids has seemed inappropriate, though that may not be intended.) It's the uptight, suspicious Grethe (Susse Wold), the kindergarten director, who rapidly spreads the hysteria, first muttering the accusation in dire hints to the assembled teachers, then passing it on to parents, asking for telltale signs of headaches or bedwetting among their kids.

The film at this stage is almost a textbook on how such rumors could be spread through the suggestibility of small children and suspicious adults who mistakenly think that in their inarticulate murmurings they somehow can be relied upon, when exactly the opposite may be the truth in such cases. Mike D'Angelo, who originally watched the film at its Cannes debut in 2012, sees The Hunt as too conventional, and points out that its story is very much like the "McMartin Preschool witch hunt (which unfolded from 1983-1990)," making its sort of "lynch-mob mentality" perhaps now no longer likely, and rather "several decades out of date." This would not invalidate the film but mean it ought to be set thirty years ago.

A weakness of the screenplay is the uncertainty whether it's even meant to be realistic. But then, it's The Hunt's hints of deep savagery in the town traditions that seem to me most interesting. Vinterberg begins with scenes of Lucas with his posse of longtime male buddies engaged in rituals of winter skinny dipping and drunken carousing. Hunting in the town is another deep ritual that goes back many generations even in Lucas' family. It's suggested that he and his best friend Theo (the deep-voiced, slightly animal-looking Thomas Bo Larsen; his head is like the head of a stag or boar) have been bonded forever. And Klara is Theo's daughter! When Theo turns against Lucas, it's something primal, like Cain and Abel. And this is what Viinterberg is striving for. And it's fascinating, even though it may be tacked onto a more conventional, perhaps slightly anachronistic, tale. The trouble is that things get a bit confusing toward the end when the film jumps forward a year, too easily skipping over the transition to Lucas' somewhat ambiguous new status.

D'Angelo is at least partly right that The Hunt lacks dramatic tension because in so much of it Lucas is simply a passive victim, "like watching a deer run from shotguns for two hours." (Isn't that the point?) Lucas isn't entirely passive, though. Some of the best moments are his intense confrontations with other men. His son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm) also enters the picture as a strong element -- and defender. The relentless first-person point of view is only interrupted during the brief but intense period when Lucas is held in jail, when it shifts to Marcus.

The spread of hysteria is a little too easily and diagrammatically laid out, and it's not really related -- but does it have to be? I don't know -- to the instinctive, primitive traditional male impulses of the ancient Danish village described through the drunken bonding and hunting. But this is the strongest, most elemental film Vinterberg has made since Celebration (which also turned on sexual abuse), a return to his Dogme roots, but in color and with better handheld digital cameras that don't make you seasick. A must-see.

The Hunt/Jagten, 115 mins., in Danish, debuted at Cannes 2012, where Mads Mikkelsen won the Best Actor award. It opened in Europe later that year; also many other festivals. US limited release 12 July 2013. Screened for this review at Angelika Film Center, NYC.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.