REVIEW: The Hunter

The producers of the internationally cherished Animal Kingdom adapt Julia Leigh’s acclaimed novel, a psychological drama set in the Tasmanian wilderness. Now playing nationwide, click for movie times.
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As anyone who saw Antichrist can testify, a Willem Dafoe woodland visit will not end well. And whilst Dafoe's biggest onset worry was apparently leeches, it's those kind of audience preconceptions and some Ocker thriller cliches that limit the success of this eco actioner.

Smart-mouth kids, unwelcoming locals and dangerous terrain all predictably make an appearance, so that by the time some yahoos turn up in a ute, with guns and deer spotters, you've already started to lose all hope of seeing anything original (it feels like a cross between Jindabyne, with its mountain-set mystery, and supernatural family drama The Tree).

Dafoe is at his inscrutable best, giving his gun-for-hire a sense of character via obsessions with opera and baths. However, most of the others are sketchy at best and bad for Tasmanian tourism at worst. Julia Leigh's 1999 source novel is highly acclaimed but TV director Nettheim only succeeds in emulating Leigh's own recent directorial effort Sleeping Beauty, with its cool detachment and melancholic pacing.