The Hunter Review

30th Oct 2012

I went to see The Hunter on a pure whim. I’d been planning to watch Killer Joe again, but it’d been so long since I’d paid to see anything at the cinema I thought perhaps it would be an idea to branch out a bit. The Hunter certainly is a ‘branch out’ film. It’s a real arty little number, about an issue no one it doesn’t directly concern ever really thinks about and essentially has very little story: it follows Martin David (Willem Dafoe), a mercenary hunter hired by chemical bigwigs Red Leaf, on his journey to hunt down and retrieve incredibly rare toxins from the last Tasmanian Tiger in the world. The creature is a very real one, and speculation about its existence has attained almost mythical status in Tasmania, where anecdotal sightings and folklore abound.

You can tell from watching it that it’s a real passion project on Daniel Nettheim’s part – based on a bestselling novel by Julia Leigh, Nettheim treats it largely as a journey of the aesthetic and the results are divine. To be fair, it would be hard to make an ugly film with the stunning vista wilderness of Tasmania as your backdrop, but he has really thought about the relationship between everything on his screen and done his absolute best to put that across to us with great success. In terms of the action it’s all very understated. Martin arrives in the Tasmanian outback posing as a zoology student researching Tasmanian devils. He is stationed with the Armstrong family, comprising konked out mother Lucy, dependent on sleeping pills following the disappearance of her husband last year, and off the rails young’uns Bike and Sass. They live in a ramshackle but quaint cabin house which serves as a time warp for the day that their father, Jarrah, went looking for the tiger himself and never came back.

The story follows two strands: Martin’s search for the tiger, and his growing affection for the Armstrong family. The two strands couldn’t oppose each other more. One has cosy domestic scenes of shared baths, mealtime jokes and neighbourhood bonfire gatherings, the other is stark, melancholy and feral. The difference of a few miles sees Martin awkwardly coming to love the two children as a replacement father figure, or setting snare traps for unsuspecting wallabies. Dafoe switches between the two with the deftness we have come to expect from this esteemed actor, and his performance is absolutely compelling on both counts.

Certainly the film is centred around Martin and his transition from heartless hunter to paternal protector, and without giving too much away the character we see at the end of the film is almost a different man (a la Tom Cruise in Rainman, perhaps). And the political context of the film, whilst very specific to Tasmania, can be applied to situations globally, so there’s no problem of the film being relatable.

I would like to lend a word to the film’s beautiful soundtrack, which captures the tension and beauty of the Tasmanian wilderness perfectly and ebbs in the background with no effort.

There are some nice extras on the DVD release, including an extended sitdown with Willem Dafoe which, whilst interesting at first, after a while becomes territory for the real die-harders out there. The real gem is the nicely segmented Making Of… which takes each of the film’s main characters and themes and spends about five minutes discussing them with everybody concerned. There section on Jarrah Armstrong is especially revealing about the filmmakers’ artistic process.

All in all, this is well worth owning. It’s not exactly Sunday afternoon viewing but when you’re in the mood for something dark, soulful and meaty, The Hunter is the perfect film for you to sink your Tasmanian teeth into with a glass of Shiraz.