The Hunter

 The Hunter (2011) features Willem Dafoe as a laconic mercenary tasked with shooting the last surviving Tasmanian tiger and harvesting its DNA for a shadowy, malign biotech firm.  Dafoe gives a constricted, low-key performance; he channels the sense of disappointment that underlies the movie.  The disappointment is not only thematic to the film, but, also, an aspect of the audience's experience:  in other words, the film is disappointing as a matter of thematic intent, but also disappoints by withholding the pleasures that would be conventional to a film of this sort.  Disappointment is not a bug but a feature of The Hunter.

Operating under the name of Martin David, Dafoe's character travels to a remote part of Tasmania and commences solitary excursions into the outback in pursuit of a single Tasmanian Tiger thought to live in the high, barren mountains.  He follows in the footsteps of another hunter who has vanished, leaving behind a devastated family.  His base-camp is the outpost from which the previous hunter named Jarrah vanished into the wilderness.  In that shack, David finds that there is no electricity, that the water is compromised, and two children are running feral in the neglected compound -- the place is like the Mexican hippie commune imagined by Robert Stone in Dog Soldiers:  there are speakers perched in trees and the branches near the house are decorated with Christmas tree lights.  Unconscious, like Sleeping Beauty, the children's mother, the wife of the missing hunter, is lying comatose in bed, doped into oblivion.  David is shocked by the desuetude in the shack and outbuildings but committed to his mission.  He tries to take a hotel room in the tiny town near the shack but the village is inhabited by malign hillbillies who are aggrieved that environmental activists are suing to shut down the town's only industry, harvesting and processing trees from the dense fern-filled jungle in the foothills to the mountains.  On several occasions. locals threaten David and we expect some sort of violence to erupt with the hero, as a trained mercenary, cracking the skulls of the village tough guys.  But this never happens.  Although there's an undercurrent of violence, no actual fighting occurs.  David is led into the wild by a bushwhacker played by Sam Neill.  Neill's character is avuncular but seems only slightly less hostile than the local hoodlums. With the help of the two children at the compound, David cleans things up, gives their mother, Lucy, a bath, gets the generator working so that the Christmas tree lights can be lit, and seems to rescue the family from their plight.  David is a fan of classical music and he plays arias and choral works from the sound system wired into the trees.  In the remote mountains, he sees tracks from the Thylacine and, perhaps, glimpses it.  He traps Tasmanian devils, guts them, and creates snares for the tiger.  But the beast is too cunning.  The scenes in the mountain meadows are impressive pictorially -- the heights look like the Scottish highlands, all heather and bog with tarns and spiky escarpments of cracked black rock.  On occasion, it rains and, even, snows.  There is a confrontation with hoodlums on the narrow highway and another encounter at a party at the compound where the widow and her children live.  But the menace posed by the locals never comes to fruition -- one side or the other keeps backing down, certainly, a realistic enough scenario but one that disappoints an audience hoping to see Dafoe's character revenge himself (and the widow) on the bad guys.  In fact, the widow says that the bad guys aren't all that bad -- they're just local men who are upset because they are unemployed.  David finds the bones of the widow but doesn't tell her.  His discovers a lair, a rocky den, where the Thylacine lives and seems to be on the verge of trapping the creature.  Sam Neill's character turns out to be in league with the biotech company.  The biotech company has lost faith in David and sends an assassin to kill David and replace him as the tiger's hunter.  This sinister plot goes awry setting up the film's inevitably disappointing and unprepossessing climax.  I won't detail the ending of the picture but will remark that the entire movie is set up to motivate a love affair between David and the young widow.  (We have seen that David has become a sort of surrogate father to the children.)  But the film disappoints -- not only is the love affair thwarted but audience expectations are disappointed in a way that seems almost perversely cruel.

The film, directed by Daniel Nettheim from a renowned novel by Julia Leigh, is always gripping.  The premise is fascinating and the movie is largely shot in the Tasmanian highlands, a remarkable landscape of heather, bogs, and boulders. But the fuse on this film is so slow-burning that it's extinguished before there is any real climax.  The picture has so much integrity that it ends in tragedy that remains undramatized.  In Australia, there is a genre of writing called Tasmanian Gothic -- Leigh's novel is considered an outstanding example of that kind of work.  The picture's ending makes sense conceptually but it doesn't satisfy the audience emotionally -- the whole thing is a sort of muted, intelligent downer.  It's very hard to understand why the movie has to end the way that it does.  Edited into the film are documentary sequences from the thirties showing the last Tasmanian Tiger in captivity.  Those images, reproduced in ghostly, silvery black and white, are profoundly disturbing:  the Tiger is a wolf-like creature with a lean, striped body and an elongated, somewhat reptilian head -- these tigers could open their jaws to an amazing breadth, a gape large enough to devour the whole world..  I think the picture is worth seeing for a number of reasons, not the least Dafoe's intelligent, melancholy performance, but you must watch this movie, if only to see the images of the tiger now thought to be extinct.