The Hunt
The Hunt (2012)
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Actors: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lasse Fogelstrøm
Synopsis: Danish infant school teacher, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), becomes subject to unsubstantiated allegations of paedophilia from one of the little girls in his school. He is victimised by the community, until the father of the little girl – who is incidentally one of his best friends – begins to question Lucas’s culpability.
Review: If you want lurid, exploitative cinema, then look no further than the Danes, and following on from similar fraught and soapy efforts with ‘high concepts’ like Brødre, Arven, and even Thomas Vinterberg’s own hugely overhyped Festen, comes this distasteful paedophilia parable The Hunt.
With The Hunt, Vinterberg’s initial hooks on paedophilia and mob culture are of some value – namely how a very young girl could confuse feelings for an adult with a jarring, accidental subjection to a sexual image (although Atonement dealt with this dialectic infinitely more intelligently), and also how a community might tiptoe around the notion of disbelieving a young girl, especially if it meant the easy casting of aspersions on a marginal outsider.
This early set-up is all well and good, but it’s how Vinterberg develops it that really betrays how he’s only shoehorning it in for the purposes of trashy sensationalism. For example, there’s something dubious and even disingenuous about the way the drama purposely excludes the normal social frameworks that would necessarily vet what are in reality extremely serious allegations, both against the accused (if guilty), but also for the accused, as the claims would need vigorous scrutiny in case he is ultimately innocent. We hear nothing about child psychologists, police investigations, and only a piecemealed off-camera segment about a court hearing. And I can accept Vinterberg’s accused, Lucas, being made a slightly awkward, taboo character in the community, but the minute we get scenes of (huge spoiler alert!) the brutal murdering of his dog and an inordinately violent assault on him when he goes shopping, then we know we’re in the titillating genre territory of a Fatal Attraction. What I think The Hunt and this lurid tangent of Danish cinema as a whole seems to confuse is the mere inclusion of serious themes and subject matter with an assumed profundity. (September 2013)
Patrick Nabarro 
That the film chooses to focus upon the devastating effects of the court of public opinion run amok rather than a purely legalistic police procedural, I think is a valid and realistic choice, not least because it is precisely the point that witch hunts even within our supposedly civil societies tend to ignore whatever happens more slowly through those more official channels of justice in the mob’s rush to judgment. Cancel culture with the attendant twitter mobs and death threats is also increasingly a thing and it doesn’t always magically work out that the targets of such get what they deserve in any proportional sense or that any actual wrongdoing was even committed beyond rumour and hearsay. For that reason I’d say this movie is well ahead of its time.