The Hunt

The Hunt (2012). Director: Thomas Vinterberg

How much would truth matter if no one believes in it? The Hunt allows us to feel the weight of this question with the story of Lucas, an ordinary man living in a small Danish town. Lucas is a well-liked man in the community and works full-time at a kindergarten. At the beginning of the story, Lucas has just put a recent divorce behind him, and his life is looking to get better in many ways. However, Lucas’ life takes an abrupt turn for the worst when one of the kindergarteners, Klara, who is also the daughter of his close friend, wrongly reports to the staff that Lucas sexually molested her. Lucas knows the truth, but when weighed against the testimony of an innocent little girl, Lucas is shocked to see how quickly his truth becomes irrelevant.

What follows, until almost the end of the story, is how Lucas suffers from a ruined reputation. Lucas’ torment highlights the absurdity of a battle that truth loses to public belief. Up to this point, The Hunt reminds me of Camus’ The Stranger, in that both use a tragic story to show how empty the truth about a person can be and the absurdity that arises from it. For this purpose, it makes sense that the story brings Lucas’ life to the lowest of low, even to the point of being somewhat unrealistically so. Aside from the absurdity, the other thing that is very much worth appreciating is the performance of Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas. He does a wonderful job giving layers to Lucas’ misery, from shocked disbelief to anger and then to despair without being melodramatic at any moment. 

The story takes another turn near the end of the story, where Klara’s father overhears her confessing the false accusation when she falls asleep, and Lucas’ name is finally cleared. A year goes by, Lucas’ life seems to return to what it used to be before the incident. People seem to believe that it was all a mistake and accept Lucas into the community once again. Right before the story comes to an end, however, it presents us with one final twist. At the very end of the story, Lucas goes hunting with other townsfolk to celebrate his son’s admission into a local hunting society. During the hunt, he gets distracted and falls behind. From somewhere unseen, a shot is fired at him but barely missed. Turning around, Lucas sees a man running away but is unable to identify who the man is, and the story ends there. 

I like the ending very much, because it shows once again how elusive the idea of truth is. Even after the truth is revealed by Klara’s confession, the other “truth” will never really go away. Instead, it takes the form of doubt and lives on. Lucas doesn’t do anything to incur his tragedy. He is simply the victim of a crime without any true criminals, trapped forever in the crevice between the truth and what people believe in.