The Hunt

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (2012) ranges far beyond the central plot of a kindergarten teacher’s life being ruined by a little girl’s false charge of molestation. Still, that provides the central emotional force.

The film’s more cerebral address is the ostensibly civilized society’s essentially tribal, predatory nature. Vinterberg examined normal familial savagery in The Celebration (1998) and tribal roots among small-town American adolescents in Dear Wendy (2005). In a small Danish town Vinterberg now examines how fragile the essential community can be when a predatory righteousness bestirs itself. When this hero is persecuted by his community his only support comes from his family.

The first scene -- a rowdy circle of male friends plunging into a freezing pond -- sets the tone of mindless macho camaraderie and bravado. That leads into perhaps the central metaphor -- the compulsion to hunt the innocent. The film is framed by two deer hunts. In the first the hero Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) in his family's tradition bags a deer. In the second his son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom) is out to kill his first. Both hunts are defined as rites initiating one into manhood. The hunt scenes cast a particular shade on the community’s turning against its popular kindergarten teacher. This is civilization "red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson not Vinterberg). The deer didn't hurt nobody.

The woman in authority is as brutish as the town’s men.  Kindergarten director Grethe (Susse Wold) has her innocent charges‘ interests in mind when she hears little Klara (marvelous Annika Wedderkopp) say Lucas exposed his erection to her. But Grethe’s compulsive persecution of Lucas turns her campaign from defense of the innocent into an attack on an innocent. Ultra vares, she interferes in Lucas’s custody battle with his ex-wife over his son Marcus. Grethe gives Lucas no chance to defend himself. In their predatory zeal Grethe and Klara’s mother ignore Klara’s attempts to recant her lie. 

The interrogation of the other children predictably produces  confirmations of Klara’s lie. The children, after all, reflect their parents’ move from rumour to mad conviction. Klara’s compulsive fear of stepping on a line on the floor or pavement reflects the adult community’s irrationality. Even after the police clear Lucas -- when the consistent details of the children’s stories prove false -- the town persists in persecuting him. He is shot at, banned and beaten in the supermarket, and his dog Fanny is dumped dead on his doorstep. The children’s detailed descriptions of being molested in Lucas’s basement are invalidated: he  has no basement. There is no depth to their charges but he is accused of subterranean evil.

Like Othello, Lucas’s vulnerability lay in his very virtue. He was given to rough-housing with the little boys, going the extra distance to help his best friend Theo’s daughter Klara, responsible enough to deflect her romantic expression, and dedicated enough upon request to wipe a young defecator’s butt. In his helplessness his every action seems only to inflame his persecution. Like Billy Budd, this innocent is helpless.

The town’s persecution of Lucas and his futile self-defense climax in the Christmas Eve church service, which celebrates children and community, featuring Klara in the kindergarten choir. Only when Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) hears Klara’s sleepy confession does he realize his and the town’s misjudgment of Lucas (spread to his son). Without verbalizing his guilt Theo brings Lucas a Christmas dinner and drink and sits with him. This rite serves to supplant the earlier rite in which the town scapegoated their former friend. As Lucas's best friend, Theo is the central battleground in the community's judgment of Lucas. Larsen plays him as a violent drunk whose face congeals in incomprehension. He has no verbal skills, no grace, just brute reflex, a savage even in comparison with the children.

Eventually the community's recovery proves shallow and fragile. An epilogue, set a year later, shows Lucas restored to his friendships, including his romance with  Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), whom he had thrown out for briefly doubting his innocence. His old friends help celebrate Marcus’s rite of manhood, the deer hunt. Instead of seeing Marcus bag his deer we see someone shoot at Lucas. Our hero still has an enemy among his “friends,” still lives in only an illusion of community. Savagery still trumps justice. 
     In the interests of that insecurity, we and Lucas don’t learn who shot at him. If no-one is blamed anyone can be guilty. We don’t need to know. Suffice it that this community remains rooted in violence and a savage impulsive "justice."

But from fugitive evidence I’d attribute the shot to Klara’s older brother, who relishes macho porn, feels angrily protective of Klara and sits bitterly apart in a scene of general reconciliation. But there I go myself -- so eager to blame someone I’ll leap to a damning conclusion on the strength of desperate evidence. Like Grethe and everyone after her. Mea culpa. But I still think the big-eared kid did it. I'm only human.