The Hunter (2011) - short film review by Julie Clarke

Photograph by Benjamin A. Sheppard. http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/news/5354/

Yesterday I saw an amazing film at the Rivoli Cinema called The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011). If your spirit in any way needs to be uplifted this is the film for you because the dense Tasmanian landscape and the haunting soundtrack (original music by Andrew Lancaster, Michael Lira & Matteo Zingales) smoothes away any wrinkles that may be forming in the mind. This is a quiet film, one that allows you to take in the majestic environment, whilst at the same time permitting you to become involved in the psyche of the few  significant characters.  Apart from the overwhelming presence of the landscape, which is shot in panoramic as well as in sweeping aerial views, camerawork of moving clouds across the sky make this film truly sublime, since nature, untouched, beautiful and at times deadly in its capacity to make the human subject feel not only out of place, but totally insignificant & swallowed up, reveals that above all some things must be preserved and others must be protected from the intrusion of human hands. I felt a real emotional connection to the landscape in this film and to the small child, who said very little and just concentrated on drawing the (almost) extinct Tasmanian Tiger. This film might be read as  one which proposes a 'nature versus science' paradigm, since it is about a high-tech biological firm that has commissioned a hunter to seek out bio-products (blood, skin and DNA samples) of the last Thylacine reported as being seen in a remote location in Tasmania, so that they may clone or otherwise use it for financial gain. However, the film is more than that, it manages to present us with several ways of considering the concept of uniqueness ~ what we value and what we don't, which may be found not only in the environment and the last remaining Thylacine, but in the few characters who are extraordinary in their particular solitude. Indeed, the characters in their own way reflect the last Thylacine - Martin (Willem Dafoe) who must live alone to hunt the Tiger, Jack (Sam Neill) who  lives by himself but keeps an eye on Lucy (Francis O'Connor) and her children who have been living alone since their  father's disappearance and of course the Tiger who finds solitude in a cave & ventures out only to find food. I would highly recommend this film. It's not only beautiful and breathtaking, but is an intelligent and thoughtful presentation, which considers our relationship to nature  (there's more than a nod to the Green movement in a scene about anti-logging of Tasmanian trees) as well as to each other. Responsibility and ethics being the key components. Surprisingly, though perhaps not so, I discovered this morning that contra what occurs in the film: In a world first, researchers from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the University of Texas, USA, have extracted genes from the extinct Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine), inserted it into a mouse and observed a biological function.