Here's something to get your teeth into over Easter: the Cannes award-winning film from Festen director Thomas Vinterberg, starring everyone's favourite Danish former Bond villain, Mads Mikkelsen. It was Mikkelsen, in fact, who ensured The Hunt got on the awards list at Cannes, carrying off the best actor gong for what critics universally judged was a superb performance of a very tricky and challenging role.
Mikkelsen plays a teacher called Lucas who finds himself mired in a very contemporary nightmare: a well-known figure in a small community, he is accused of sexually abusing a child, and swiftly becomes the target of mob hysteria. After its Cannes premiere, our critic Peter Bradshaw immediately hailed it as a major return to form by Vinterberg, whose career had seemed to go backwards after his superb Dogme-influenced debut:
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.
Xan Brooks interviewed Vinterberg shortly afterwards, when the director talked about the film's genesis:
He explains that the idea had been seeded years before by some notes handed to him by a child psychiatrist and that the film's central interrogation scene (which initially struck me as over-egged and unconvincing) is actually a cleaned-up version of a real transcript. The result, he says, is a film about a witch-hunt and its victims; a story that identifies a new strain of wickedness. "Of course abuse happens – I made a film about that already. But I think that there's this other danger and it demands new sacrifices, new victims. These victims are not only the men – and sometimes women – who are accused of something they haven't done. But they are also the children who grow up believing they are victims. Those children operate under the grand illusion that something bad has happened to them; they grow up with similar experiences to the children who really did experience it." He draws a breath. "It's rotten, rotten territory."
And as if you didn't need any more encouragement, here's Peter Bradshaw talking about the film, along with compadres Henry Barnes and Catherine Shoard, when it was released in the UK last November.
