Film Review: The Hunter

The Hunter. Rated M (coarse language and infrequent violence). 100 mins. Directed by Daniel Nettheim. Screenplay by Alice Addison. Based on Wain Fimeri’s original adaptation of the novel by Julia Leigh.

Please note: This review contains spoilers below the line.

As iconic contemporary cinema scenes go, there are few that can rival the epic, purely cinematic torque of Platoon Sergeant Elias’s (Willem Dafoe) brutal slaying at the hands of enemy forces in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War masterpiece Platoon (1986). As the American soldiers are successfully evacuated in helicopters (to the unexpected accompaniment of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings), Chris (Charlie Sheen) spots Elias – still on the ground – desperately attempting to out-run enemy bullets. Even though the US choppers return to try and rescue him, it is too late. It is unforgettable, gut-wrenching stuff – and Dafoe’s performance in this sequence (and, in fact, the entire film) is extraordinary.

In Alan Parker’s searing Mississippi Burning (1988), Dafoe is brilliant as FBI Agent Alan Ward opposite Gene Hackman’s Agent Rupert Anderson. When the two men are called upon to investigate the murder of civil rights workers in 1964, the young Agent Ward finds himself pitted as much against Anderson’s rogue methods of enquiry as he does against the sinister townsfolk and their links to the infamous Ku Klux Klan.

In Mr Nettheim’s brooding, moody and slippery The Hunter, Dafoe is perfectly cast as Martin David – a mercenary sent by the mysterious biotech company Red Leaf to trap a Tasmanian Tiger which has reportedly been sighted in a particularly remote part of the Tasmanian wilderness. Masquerading as a university eco-researcher, Martin finds himself billeted with a young family at the base of the mountainous terrain where the tiger has apparently been spotted. Young mum Lucy (Frances O'Connor) spends her days and nights tranquillised by prescription drugs while her children Sass (Morgana Davies) and Bike (Finn Woodlock) roam freely about the property like young cubs of a mountain pride. Their father and Lucy’s husband has been missing in the mountainous terrain for months – having, himself, been hunting the elusive tiger. Supported, watched and shadowed by local guide Jack Mindy (a sinister Sam Neill), Martin departs on his hunt for the tiger – unlocking a veritable Pandora’s Box of haunting psychological challenges along the way.

If the film never quite reaches the soaring, psychologically thrilling heights to which it aspires from a story-telling point of view, technically Nettheim’s big-picture aspirations are hypnotic – grounded by the fiercely protected claims to sovereignty maintained by the logging and ecological industries as they go head-to-head in Ms Addison’s refreshingly unsentimental screenplay. But while there’s much to be said for the dank, harsh and unforgiving Tasmanian wilderness – the undeniable co-star of this film is flawlessly interrogated by cinematographer Robert Humphreys (Somersault) – the script is indecisive with regards to precisely just how much of its protagonist’s darkside it wants to explore.

What powers the overriding sense of paranoia and helplessness is suspicion – and suspicion, as Alfred Hitchcock, for example, knew only too well, takes time. In The Hunter, Nettheim certainly takes his time, and is more than ably-rewarded by the intricacies of the almost therapeutic nature of Dafoe’s patient snare building and trap setting. If Ms O’Connor’s under-written Lucy exists chiefly to ferry cups of tea about the place, Woodlock turns in a superb performance that belies his age as the mute young son – and it is in all of his scenes with Dafoe (particularly a stunning generator-repair sequence and the sequence when he leads Martin from the property on his bicycle) that The Hunter dips its toe masterfully into deeply rewarding territory.

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When Dafoe finally does confront his prey (brilliantly realised to mythological proportions by Sydney-based visual effects company Fuel VFX) – The Hunter sheds what had previously appeared to be comparatively tenuous and less-interesting sub-plots (what motivates Mr Neill's excellent Jack Mindy remains something of a mystery) to become something transcendentally arresting. It’s an unlikely moment of cinematic genius – where each of the film’s previously disparate threads suddenly unite in perfectly metered, breathless hyper-realism.

While the film’s final schoolyard scene plays with something like a terribly convenient epilogue, it’s actually not until days after seeing the film that the grand sense of completion evolves to a greater understanding and appreciation of everything this film has set out to achieve. Its greatest success is the extent to which it haunts you, both emotionally and psychologically – ultimately revealing itself to be unforgettable cinematic poetry that quite clearly marks Mr Nettheim and his impossibly daring producer Vincent Sheehan (Animal Kingdom) as the ones to watch.

The Hunter screens nationally from 6 October.

Pictured: Willem Dafoe and Finn Woodlock in The Hunter. Image courtesy Madman Entertainment.