I watched this with my friend just the other day. I had seen it previously, but highly recommended it and decided to watch it with him, his first time. Immediately we started discussing just how wonderful Dafoe is and how beautifully shot this movie is (in relation to the film Antichrist, which Dafoe also starred in and was visually beautiful). We even established a game of finding horrible moments to use as a poster for the movie, since beautiful scenes were so populace. We even later used the game on the, admittedly bland, film Moon, but that's another review. The film follows a hunter tasked to find, kill, and collect samples of the last known living Tasmanian tiger, only to grow close to a widow and her children. Dafoe takes the place of a father figure, fixing up the house and getting the mother off pills, even taking an awkward bath with the children (against his protests). The euphoria of Dafoe traversing the Tasmanian wilderness and constant anxiety sets the tone for this gray movie. Not gray in the sense of boring, gray in the sense of simplistic elegance. Long story short, I loved the movie. My friend had a different idea. He wanted a movie about a hunter with social anxieties. A hunter that only truly felt alive when he was out hunting, instead of one being humanized by some strange family. My friend wanted a different movie. If you think this is going to be about some edgy badass hunter, it's not. It's about a man, a family, and a tiger, and that's all you really need.
Review of The Hunter
