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Written by Pete Timmermann Wednesday, 24 July 2013 17:56

Can one really ever play against type if they have as much range as Mikkelson has?

I keep forgetting that these days everyone seems to know who Mads Mikkelson is. He’s been floating around the European film scene for over a decade now, turning in memorable performances in movies not a lot of people have seen (my favorite being his turn as One Eye, the main character in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising), but these days Americans recognize him as Le Chiffre from Casino Royale or Hannibal Lecter from the TV series Hannibal. Here in Thomas Vinterberg’s new film The Hunt, Mikkelson appears to be playing against type as a reserved kindergarten teacher who gets in a lot of trouble through no fault of his own. He won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2012 for his performance here, and it begs the question, can one really ever play against type if they have as much range as Mikkelson has?

Of course, it helps that this is a complex role in a strong movie. What happens in The Hunt is that, after the film establishes Mikkelson’s Lucas as a good, decent man, he gets accused of child molestation. The audience knows all along that he is innocent—it’s a matter of confused people making other people confused, like a disease, until everyone in town believes he’s guilty—but our knowledge and his knowledge of his innocence does not make his life any easier. The accuser, such as it is, is his best friend’s daughter, Klara (young Annika Wedderkopp, who is as good as Mikkelson here), who has a little-girl crush on Lucas and separately sees porn briefly on her older brother’s computer; these two things sort of congeal in her head and lead her to make an incriminating statement to a teacher, which starts the whole snowball rolling on Lucas.

The Hunt is one of those low-key movies that is almost unbearably suspenseful if only because it never appears to actually do anything—at any moment it seems likely to erupt into violence (or worse), but Vinterberg knows how to play with your anticipation in a way that makes you squirm much more than jump. Of course, he’s aided by Mikkelson in this; despite being a nice and mostly unintimidating man, his performance of Lucas has shades of Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, in that we get the feeling that he can take care of himself if he needs to.

If you’ve spent this review trying to remember where you know Thomas Vinterberg’s name from, he is one of the cofounders of the Dogme 95 movement alongside Lars Von Trier, and the director of the one indisputable classic from that cycle of films, 1998’s The Celebration. In the years since then he’s turned out some good movies (I was one of seemingly few fans of 2004’s Dear Wendy), but has never quite repeated the success he found with The Celebration. While The Hunt may not be quite that good, if nothing else it does prove that Vinterberg’s still got it; I’m sure I won’t be the only one eagerly waiting for Vinterberg’s next picture. | Pete Timmermann