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Nettheim, working with the impressive cinematography of Robert Humphreys (whose work I first noticed on the 2004 Cate Shortland film Somersault, which introduced the world to the actor Abbie Cornish), hones it into an existential-crisis film: a story about the loneliness of the long-distance hunter, about man against the elements and his own feelings of mortality. The first half-hour is all about the set-up but as soon as we see the vast range of mountains and rainforest, nature takes its own course and the film unfurls as Martin opts to journey on alone. It might be said, particularly by Philip French if he were here, that these two factions are at loggerheads…įrom then on, the film steadily develops, opening out at the same time as Martin catches sight of the magnificent wilderness stretching before him. Soon, though, he's off into the hills to track his prey, assisted by a kindly enough neighbour called Jack Mindy (Sam Neill) who has taken it upon himself to look in on the Armstrong children regularly.Įn route to the forests, Martin and Jack encounter environmental protesters – the "greenies" – and loggers, workers on practically the only industry in the island's interior. Martin sets about restoring power and water to the dwelling, necessitating more contact with the children than we feel he would like. Jarrah's wife, Lucy (Frances O'Connor), lies comatose with grief and barbiturates in her bed while her two children, Sass and Bike, run almost feral around the wooden building and its muddy outhouses. After a hostile reception at the local pub, where he's told "we don't like greenies around here", Martin finds lodgings at the ramshackle house of another university researcher, Jarrah Armstrong, who has been missing for months. However, arriving in a small logging town in Tasmania, Dafoe assumes the alias of Martin David, and claims to be sent from "the university" as part of a field study into the behaviour of Tasmanian devils. I was even reminded of George Clooney's recent gunsmith in The American. He has all the traditional film hallmarks of an assassin and we're clearly supposed to think of him as such, one in the mould of Edward Fox's Jackal perhaps, or Jean Reno's Léon, with loner tendencies and precision instruments. It is unclear what Dafoe's character does for a living.
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Willem Dafoe, an actor we see all too rarely in lead roles, is superb as the titular hunter, hired by a dubious biotech corporation to track down the Tasmanian tiger, a fox-like creature thought to have been extinct since the 1930s. Thankfully, where Sleeping Beauty was all cold, hard stares in airless rooms, The Hunter, directed by Daniel Nettheim, is glorious in its widescreen, weather-lashed treatment of the great outdoors. Not to be confused with Steve McQueen's last film of the same name (although I'm sure echoes are intended), it's based on a book by Julia Leigh, the writer who made her own debut as a film-maker at Cannes in 2011 with the neo-feminist erotic curio Sleeping Beauty. The latest of these is The Hunter, an Australian film set entirely in one of the last great wildernesses, Tasmania. From the great explorer films of the early years such as The Lost World and King Kong, through to westerns, and later classics such as The Deer Hunter and White Hunter Black Heart, directors have used nature and the chase to depict man confronting his inner self, wrestling with his wild ego and his civilised id.
![the tiger hunter where filmed the tiger hunter where filmed](http://de.web.img3.acsta.net/pictures/20/10/28/17/23/0320160.jpg)
H unting is a longstanding metaphor in the movies.