LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: THOMAS VINTERBERG'S THE HUNT

Thomas Vinterberg is best known for Festen, his second feature film released in 1998 as the first production from Dogme, which he founded with Lars Van Trier. Fourteen years later, Vinterberg returns to the theme of child abuse within a tightly-wrapped part of Danish society, and again, it is with group ritual as a backdrop. In Festen, the film is about secrets that need to come out. The Hunt (Jagten in Danish), which is screened today at the London Film Festival, is about the way accusation can become the same as guilt.

In a small town in rural Denmark, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is a former teacher, who had lost his job when the school was closed by budget cuts. His wife has left him, taking their teenaged son, and he now lives alone, working as an assistant in a kindergarten, where he is popular with the kids whom he obviously adores. He is especially good with Klara, the daughter of his best-friend Theo. Lucas' only social interaction comes with the members of his hunting club, which binds the men of the village together.

Klara seeks out Lucas when her parents don't pay her enough attention, but one day, when he attempts to distance himself slightly from her, she feels rejected and through a series of easy misunderstandings, Lucas finds himself accused of child abuse. The film is pretty much unequivocal about his innocence—though his withdrawn personality and sometimes intense anger leaves a little ambiguity—and it is perhaps at its best as the noose of accusation draws tighter and tighter around Lucas. Vinterberg details it carefully, and is helped by some small but finely judged performances, particularly by Anne Louise Hassing as Grethe, the head of the kindergarten, and (uncredited) the excellent Bjarne Henriksen (best-known here as the father in The Killing) as the specialist who comes to hear Klara's story.

False accusation of child abuse has prompted a few This is The Crucible redone for a modern era, and Lucas bit by bit finds himself an outcast, losing his job, the chance of access to his son, and driving away his new girlfriend, an outsider herself as an immigrant to Denmark working at the kindergarten. The dilemma faced by Theo (played with some relish by Thomas Bo Larsson) contrasts with the complete protective turn by his wife (Susse Wold), and what makes it work is how perfectly understandable it is. It is also helped by the perfectly pitched performance of young Annike Wedderkopp as Klara, who manages to convey beyond her innocence, the sense of powerlessness as adults take things out of control. The control of the film is superb, as it builds slowly in intensity, and the cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Christensen (below right, with Vinterberg) is superb. The Danish village is rendered warm at first, but increasingly cold and puritanical, while the surrounding countryside and its darkness seems to impinge more and more on it—the hunt, as it were, turned inward. When invisible assailants kill Lucas' beloved dog, and he buries her in a driving rain, the point could not be driven home more clearly.

Vinterberg does include a scene where the audience can actually relate to villains, those who feel they have to strike out at the evil-doer in their midst. In this The Hunt differs from, say, Mick Jackson's Indictment: The McMartin Trial, where the demarcation with James Woods, a lawyer-hero, is much stronger, and even The Crucible, where ulterior motives among the prosecutors are very much the case, and very much the core of the metaphor Arthur Miller was detailing. But despite the touch of melodrama in the film's biggest scene, which takes place in a church, at Christmas, when the rituals are maintained, it works as a catalyst.

Especially because of Mikkelsen's brilliant performance. He is on screen through virtually all of the film, and he is holding so much in he almost requires the audience make its own choice about him, whether to believe him or condemn him. This restraint contains a good deal of righteousness, and he simply refuses to accept his isolation from the community. Thus, even though he is eventually vindicated by law (luckily for him, his other best-friend, his son's godfather, is a lawyer and never doubts him), and rejoins the hunt club along with his son, we sense in many minds the stigma remains. The film ends with a hunt, and Vinterberg manages to avoid both melodrama and cliché, which works brilliantly. The Hunt is a superb piece of film-making, and it will be hard to find many better films in this year's LFF.

A VERY DANISH KILLING

BBC4 has now reached the halfway point, ten episodes, of the exceptional Danish crime drama The Killing. It follows in the wake of the Scandinavian crime boom, the Swedish and British Wallander shows, the Millennium films, and the best-sellers by Mankell, Larsson, Jo Nesbo, and others. But in fact, it's already nearly four years old, first shown in Denmark in 2007, and while it shares many of the characteristics of its Nordic peers, The Killing has a lot more in common with a number of Danish films, and some other European series, than with that new wave of Scandicrime.

A high-school girl is found raped, tortured, and murdered, in a car sunk into a lake outside Copenhagen. The car belongs to the city's leading opposition political party, who are beginning a reform campaign in the mayoral elections. The case is picked up by detective Sarah Lund, on her last day on the job before moving with her son to Sweden, to live with her boyfriend and work in the Swedish police. It's a simple story, which begins to take on multiple layers of complexity and emotion.

Of course the first thing that stands out is the format, 20 one-hour episodes, like a Bizzaro version of 24, which allows those layers to develop. What this amount of time provides is the opportunity to approach the one thing which is hardest to do in the television format: inner feelings, and also allows the programme to deal in the 'real-time', or longer term, effects of the crime. Which by the way is what the Danish title, Forbrydelsen, means, not 'the killing'. This allows one of the three main strands of the narrative, the story of the family of the teenaged girl who's been killed, to carry equal weight with the other two: the search for the killer, and the effect of the crime on the politics of Copenhagen, especially as the reform mayoral candidate, Troels Hartmann, becomes a suspect.

The police procedural part conforms best to the nordic crime mould, especially since Lund (Sofie Grabol) is a good cop, both thorough and instinctive. Grabol is able to appear both inspired and overwhelmed at the same time, a rare talent in an actor, and is completely believeable as a cop, even when wlaking around in that Faroese sweater that apparently has become a fashion item in Demark. When the show begins, she is partnered with her successor, Jan Meyer, who appears to be neither of those things. She is also obsessive, to the detriment of her family; she is Martin Beck or Wallander. What is interesting is the way each relationship in each strand in the film is put under pressure: Lund's with her Swedish police psychologist boyfriend (as well as her new work partner); the victim's parents with each other in their grief, and Hartmann's with his girlfriend and campaign manager Rie.

The format makes it an actors' series, and the actors do not disappoint. They have the advantage of looking real, never like actors playing roles, which was the biggest fault with the BBC Wallander. Bjarne Henricksen and Ann Elenora Jorgensen, as the parents of the murdered Anna Birk Larsen, are spectacularly believable, which makes both her grief, and his ill-judged vengeance in the early episodes, powerfully moving. Crime dramas don't often stay focused on the families of the lost, unless revenge is the reason, and in this case the internal family crisis is every bit as much of a thriller as the hunt for the killer. There is also the subtle parallel with the single-mother status of Lund, whose son does not want to move to Sweden, whose ex has just reappeared on the scene, and whose mother appears to consider her a totally unfit parent.

The Swedish boyfriend was a figure of some humour, if I'm picking up on the use of accents—the precise formality of Swedish against the sing-songy, clipped words and slurred contractions of Danish. But his analysis of the killings, that they are the work of someone who has killed before, and who has planned carefully, is what provides the real depth of the second-half of the story, or at least will when Lund finally gets around to acting on the ideas (as of episode 12 she has still ignored what is presuemably evidence of other murders by the same killer).

It is also what makes Lars Mikkelsen's performance as Hartmann so stunning, because he has established himself as a decent man, as a cunning manipulator, as a put-upon victim and as a viable suspect, all in the space of four episodes. Mikkelsen is probably the most, if not only, familiar face to most English viewers, from Flame and Citron, Island of Lost Souls, or The Kings Game (all of which I reviewed, from the London Film Festival, for Crime Time) and in fact it is as if he has stepped out of The King's Game, a seriously over-looked political thriller. Because politics lies at the heart of everything the Hartmann does, and, we suspect, everything that is happening to him. In that, his relationship with Rie (played by Marie Askehave with some glamour, which in the context makes her immediately suspicious) is perfect: she is a political insider, her father is a power-broker, her glamour suggests the lack of ideals which Hartmann professes, but may psychopathically be betraying.

It's a rich mixture, whose intelligence makes it compelling viewing. The Killing appears to be gaining the kind of word of mouth traction that channels like BBC4 are supposed to provide. In much the same way as the Swedish Wallander and the exceptional first series of the French Spiral, it proves that there are all sorts of approaches to the crime genre, and that many of old formulae which have carried British TV for so long are no longer automatically 'the best TV in the world' as I've heard echoed for decades by people who appear ever to have seen a foreign show unless it were American. And of course, speaking of America, there have already been comparisons made to The Wire, but The Killing is a very different thing. Yes, both shows essay a novelistic approach, but the means are different, the formats are different, the societies are different, and the portrayals of corruption are different; it is less endemic in The Killing, as if the society still harbours hope behind its political corruptions. In The Wire, the killings were part of a more total breakdown. In The Killing, it may be only the suggestion of the fissures starting to show.

This article will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)