Thomas Vinterberg’s FESTEN explored a heated family celebration made all the more corrosive by the revelation of child abuse, a narrative exposure underscored by the exacting and naturalistic values and methods of the Dogme 95 movement it inaugurated. Vinterberg’s latest, THE HUNT, breaks free from the strictures of that simplistic form by concentrating on a similarly scathing accusation, one that sets about destroying a seemingly perfect idyll.

After a string of poorly received projects that failed to match his most celebrated early work, Vinterberg returns with a deeply unsettling and powerful film that features another excoriating look at the penalties of seething accusations.  The outstanding Mads Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a role that won him the Best Actor gong at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Lucas is a cherished kindergarten assistant slowly getting back on track after a vicious divorce and the loss of his previous job. Still fighting for regular visitation rights to his teenage son, Lucas’s world is further crushed when his daughter’s best friend Klara (the superb Annika Wedderkopp), who is one of his pupils, charges him with indecent exposure: an allegation he immediately refutes. As the parents of the schoolchildren rally against him, lobbying for his arrest in an overnight smear campaign, Lucas becomes the victim of malicious scorn from a close-knit community, facing a tidal wave of unjust ferocity from a society which once respected him.

Vinterberg has created a masterful film full of emotional nuance and heartbreaking tension, whose overwhelming narrative thrust is met with a closely observed and poignantly acted gentility.

Peeling away the drama from Lucas’s jaded perspective, fuelled by the fact that we as an audience are privy to his innocence, Vinterberg has created a masterful film full of emotional nuance and heartbreaking tension, whose overwhelming narrative thrust is met with a closely observed and poignantly acted gentility. Lucas is a man whose friendliness and popularity leads him to being a valued member amongst his friends and neighbours, a man who participates in local traditions and assumes an integral and supportive figure to those around him, especially the children who he cares for so dearly. Mikkelsen’s convincingly reined-in performance, which utilises his facial features and a soft demeanour over that of his physicality (something stressed in his antagonistic role in CASINO ROYALE) is the film’s beating heart, something that makes Lucas’s doomed fall from grace – itself the victim of mass hysteria at the hands of an agonisingly unreliable source – all the more painful.

A later stage scene at a Christmas Eve church service is almost unbearably shattering, indicative of a film that delicately weaves a distressing amount of humanity through an emotionally complex story. Although, ostensibly, the film’s coda begins to pick up the narrative pieces, an unsettling final scene stresses that the damage brought upon by an instinctive and resolutely unquestionable belief in the innocence of children can never be overturned.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYn6L5fF9Q