A Review of the 2012 movie "The Hunt"
"The Hunt" is a weird movie where the entire time I spent like a horror movie yelling at the screen "don't open that door!" I guess I have the mistaken view that I know about how to handle traumatic situations but I think the best thing would be to get the authorities involved, immediately, for the main character's case. I suppose the ideas of justice I'm most readily pushing forward involve social workers.
The movie would instead put the onus of its social critique on the individuals of a upper-class gang of parents who turn to violence after a mistaken case of sexual violence against their children emerges. It is such the case that we see people caught in the moral division between believing a friend and rightfully setting up boundaries in such a situation. The tragedy pretty much stems, in my analysis, from the fact that those boundaries were not properly dealt with, the social contract with these things being not popularly understood at all.
The movie really though moves beyond all that by moving ahead in time in segments of a year or so, wherein the much subtler distinctions of how friends and family digest trauma over time becomes the subject. It is here where the moral calculus becomes closer to what I accept as good subject matter for a film because there is no clear guiding line for the years after trauma. Something like a forgiveness can creep in, various objections and violences can happen, in a more open playing field, where the solution is not so clear, whereas for all the earlier stuff I only have this stringent assertion to the characters: seek help, seek professional help!!
