The Hunt

Thomas Vinterberg’s 2012 Danish film Jagten drops Lucas, who works at a nursery, into a child abuse accusation in a small town. The film hands the audience the truth in its first stretch. The question is not what happened but when the people who lack that information will decide, and on what; the tension comes from evidence never being looked for. Vinterberg also keeps Lucas inside the town: the supermarket, the church and his hunting friends all stay places he has to keep walking into. By the director’s own account the story arrived with a neighbour at the door. A psychiatrist from his street, a stranger, knocked and said he had a lot of these cases on his desk and a film he ought to make. Once Mads Mikkelsen joined, the part was rewritten with him, settling on “a little bit more of a Scandinavian, humbled, slightly castrated, good hearted man”. It is a Danish and Swedish co-production, Zentropa with Film i Väst and Zentropa International Sweden. Cannes 2012 gave it three prizes: Best Actor for Mikkelsen, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and the Vulcain Prize for the cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen. Amour took the Palme d’Or. As Denmark’s entry it was nominated for Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, where The Great Beauty won.