Rent The Hunt (2012)

Brilliant, powerful, Danish film about a man falsely charged with child abuse - The Hunt review by PV

This film is brilliant - and should have won the Oscar for best foreign film 2012, and every other award going.

This really is a must-see. For all MPs, teachers, paranoid parents, children's groups etc.

The script makes the dialogue, and the characters who speak it, so very believable, as a tragedy unfolds, (perfectly paced), all spurred on by parental paranoia, false rumours, a 'no smoke without fire' reasoning, and the sort of vile mob mentality we often see in Britain today.

Indeed, some of the lines reminded me of some of the silly things my female colleagues used to say when I was a college teachers - the nursery school scenes here show how very stupid such people can be, and how their wooly reasoning destroys an innocent man's life. This movie shows all men are extremely vulnerable to being a victim of such false accusations - which is perhaps why the school system today is being so feminised and female-dominated as to be a man-free zone: why should men expose themselves to a hellish experience like this?

This film should be remade in English and shown to all those thinking of assuming anyon accused of any crime (esp child abuse) is automatically guilty, or that children always tell the truth: the way adults project what they want onto children in this film is brilliantly done, and disturbingly believable and realistic. This makes it moving and sometimes disturbing really - one almost has to watch through one's fingers as the mob of gullible parents turn on their former friend (who is a great teacher!).

Particulatly chilling is the vile head of the nursery who idiotically seems to believe that children never tell lies, and seems to think all men who are ever alone with children are therefore guilty of child abuse.

The way the false accusations grow like a virus and never go away is handled brilliantly right up until the last scenes.

The only part that didn't really work for me was the deer/hunting analogy (though I am not Danish and have never been hunting, so maybe that's why!) - though it works way better than that silly scene in The Queen with the stag called Diana (yawn!).

But that is a small gripe.

This film deserves a much wider audience - and perhaps a remake for those too lazy or illterate to read subtitles.

It fully deserves 5 stars as the best foreign film I have seen in the last year, or maybe the last 5 years.

A brilliant, moving and sometimes disturbing movie.

Love mads - The Hunt review by NG

Great story. Powerful, uncomfortable, sad but beautifully filmed and mads mikkelson just captivates from the moment he is comes into view

Excellent - The Hunt review by CP Customer

I really enjoyed this and thought it thought provoking, atmospheric and well acted.

It was interesting to see the effect of false allegation on one individual & think it shows that, even if believed to be innocent,-mud sticks.

Good ending.