Daniel Nettheim’s adaptation of Julia Leigh’s novel has the same frustratingly passive quality as Leigh’s directorial debut, Sleeping Beauty. Both films face the problem of illuminating the inner lives of inscrutable protagonists. So much here feels opaque and perplexing.
Nonetheless, Nettheim’s dispassionate approach manages to be both tense and meditative. Van Diemen’s Land made more evocative use of the same Tasmanian highlands, but Nettheim conjures – with varying degrees of subtlety – the fraught rural community Martin David (a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe) enters when a shadowy biotech conglomerate commissions him to hunt the last remaining Tasmanian tiger.
The taciturn mercenary is profoundly altered by his encounters with the wilderness… and with the broken family in whose house he bases himself – Lucy (Frances O’Connor) and her kids (Morgana ‘that awful brat from The Tree’ Davies and Finn Woodlock). There’s particularly effective scene soundtracked by Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’. But can Martin trust his genial fixer Jack Mindy (Sam Neill)? The Hunter is most powerful when it highlights that the tiger is not just an animal, but a chimera of various characters’ hopes and desires – to belong; to covet; to exploit; to do what’s right; to recapture what’s lost.
WHAT
The Hunter
WHEN
In cinemas October 6
PREVIEW
WIN
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Australian Competitions Club
