The Hunt

The enfant terrible of Dogme and Festen (The Celebration) has not mellowed when it comes to tracking down human weaknesses, but the form of his cinema has changed. Gone is the shaky camerawork of his early days to give the impression of realism, replaced by a grandiose scope that makes Jagten (The Hunt) look like a contemporary Western. Thomas Vinterberg takes up one of its motifs: a man wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit – in this case, a particularly atrocious crime of paedophilia. (...) The subject of Jagten is not the sexual abuse of children, but rather the portrait of a village community that is quick to burn what it has adored, to hang the unfortunate man high, as in the dark ages of history. Alone against everyone, or almost everyone – there are magnificent scenes with his son Marcus – Lucas not only has to fight against a lie that will ruin his life, but also against the slow poison that is rumour and hearsay. (...) Thomas Vinterberg has the good idea of never building up any suspense about his hero’s guilt, instead asking us about our own conscience and the stigmatisation of this or that individual. What would we do if our neighbour was accused of paedophilia? Would we also take out our pitchforks, drunk with anger fuelled by hatred of our fellow man? As a man hounded by everyone, but who finds the strength to resist, Mads Mikkelsen proves once again that he is one of the greatest actors in contemporary cinema. And the acting prize he won at the last Cannes Film Festival is the most deserved of all awards. (Yannick Vely; Paris Match)�