Essay on the Hunt Analysis

The hunt ^[a]is a beautifully executed film about a very sensitive subject which is child abuse. While there is no actual abuse or pedophilia shown in the movie yet it is one of the highly successful movies made on the subject. Mads Mikkelsen who plays Lucas and Annika Wedderkopp who plays Klara perfectly capture and portray the characters in the movie to the extent of emotionally getting them attached to the audience and making the story feel more real and alive. ^[b]The story revolves around a white lie, community fears, lost truth, false memory and how humans tend to pre-judge each other before giving someone a chance to prove or defend themselves; basically judged as guilty until proven innocent as per the human nature code, Friendship is being tested too in the movie where a person gets to see everyone’s true color towards him ^[c]only when faced with great problems. Surprisingly, every element and factor in the movie almost reached perfection; the lighting, plot, acting and underlying messages within the film and what it symbolizes which will be later discussed in this essay. ^[d]This is one of the movies where it is actually hard to predict it’s ending unlike most action movie nowadays where you know that the hero would sweep in to save the day, in the hunt the audience are attracted with high curiosity to how would Lucas clear his name and it eventually happens from a realistic unbelievable solution that saves his life and exonerates him.  ^[e]In overall it is a brilliant movie and deserves to be nominated for Oscar.

The hunt or Jagten was inspired by the extensive research of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus on the topic of false memory; Loftus describes the phenomenon as “Many people believe memory works like a recording device. Memory works more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.’’. False memories are deformed and sometimes a memory can be made up and altered by other people or our minds therefore it can never be 100 percent genuinely stored in someone’s consciousness, this applies to all childhood dreams of anyone. Loftus help treat study some of these cases that was related to child molesting; both which led to the idea of the spectacular movie. The movie also touches on another subject which is confabulation which is a birth related disorder that involuntary produces lies in the mind and imaginative things without the persons awareness or willingness to deceive. ^[f]At the beginning before the lie sprawled into action and the movie became tense, a scene seemed unimportant where Klara’s brother and his friend show her a picture of a penis and makes a joke about it, Later on this becomes the basis of her lie. It is impossible to find out what exactly was going through Klara’s mind, whether she was confabulating or a combination of false memories or wanting to hurt Lucas for thinking he ignored her but at first she looks aware she made it up, as the movie progresses she believes it actually happened because of the outside influences on her from the parents and the community. Scenes such as her talk with the psychologist they got for her and when she told her mother the truth that Lucas was innocent but her mother instead explains to her that her mind is blocking the memory for being too painful and choose to believe the false version of the story. In an interchangeable way, the rest of the community starts seeing the lie as the truth therefore when Lucas tries to exonerate himself, he is seen as a liar against the community’s collective truth. People tend to have an established social norms or values that only exist because almost everyone knows about it and agrees on it, ^[g]example: when a group of employees in an office agree that each day one of them would bring breakfast to the whole office and that is a social collective construction of reality, on a larger scale stuff like money, property and governments. ^[h]This concept is directly related to the movie where one scene someone say that there is no more doubt that Lucas is a child molester; it shows that the community has established that fact on a collective basis with barely zero evidence,^[i] just the testimony of a confused child. The^[j] fragile nature of memory and truth is thoroughly examined in the plot and how a lie can receive the status of truth. Thus, the line between truth and lies becomes subjective in the eyes of society. When you love something so much as when you love a child, that love can turn into fear. Love is extremely powerful and will be as powerful when turned around is one of the main themes imbedded within the movie as Mads said in the hunt press conference^[k][l]. The^[m] communities’ social norm acceptance of lies as the essential truth is one of the central themes. The line between truth and lies is thin, in an early scene in the movie, Theo tells Lucas that he can differentiate when he is lying but when Lucas gets accused of the sexual abuse; the boundary between both becomes vague and Theo is confused in between^[n].  

A minor theme that can be seen in this movie is how adults sometimes tend to pressure their children into believing or doing something they do not want to in the beginning instead of actually listening to them. A similar movie to this topic is the Horsemen produced in 2009.^[o] This idea is seen where Klara-a lonely girl, lacking family intimacy and care- tries to tell every adult how she said something foolish and not right, but they pressure her or ignores what she says on the basis that it is her vivid imagination or repressing memories and choose to believe what they want to or what they fear. ^[p]Klara is not a resentful child but she is the result of growing in a community where men like to take naked dips in the water and she can be exposed to graphic images at any time. Also^[q] the director deliberately did not show the police interrogation to further emphasize that the point of the film is not one of thriller or mystery but it focuses on the trials and tribunals of Lucas and suffering he undergoes due to Klara’s foolish lie^[r]. Lucas’s^[s] son moves the audience’s emotion by his relationship to his father and how he always believed that his father would never be capable of such a thing, it took lots of courage for his character to go up to Theo’s house and confront Klara in a way to let his anger out and try to clear his father’s name after he saw the injustice of him getting taken away by the police. His love to his father is also shown again when he is holding a lighter and watching old pictures of his father hanged in the godfather’s house showing that he is getting insomnia and could not sleep due to worrying about his father’s innocence. When he learns that they are releasing his father, shots are shown of him looking at the sky, trees and wood that might be symbolizing freedom.

The hunt was shot in multiple beautiful locations in Denmark, in what is believed to be a small tight middle-class community. The lighting throughout the film is always light and warm, usually using yellow lampshades and decorative lights. Whether it is artificial or natural light, it always had that warm feeling ^[t]to it. Color plays a great role in movies, each color has a significance and symbolism to it, when Lucas’s son called him in the middle of the night, Lucas had a red lampshade over him which signifies warning, when he is flirting with Nadia and having drinks with his friends, the lights are always yellow and orange which symbolizes warmth, joy, happiness, humor, energy and optimism. ^[u]Lighting style of the movie is mainly realism because it makes the film tend to be tortuous^[v], the sudden turn of events for the main character, using outdoor natural light, real existing building instead of building sets, often handheld camera or on a tripod for shots because the director tries to ensure the illusion that the world where the movie happens is manipulated to emphasize that the film is about everyday situations that might happen in someone’s life. The same technique was used in the famous classic movie ‘The Bicycle Thief’. This leads to the significance of the action happening in the movie is not the not the main attraction but in the inspection and observation the life of the protagonist and respecting it rather than having an automated plot with characters working for it^[w]. Another number of elements are studied in the movie to prove its realism; the absence of non-diegetic sounds, informal conversational dialogues, light camerawork and muted color photography also the sense that the story of the film is progressing naturally due to life and serves up a social problem that is actually occurring instead of an escape from it.