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The Hunter
Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival September 9, 2011
Plot (Spoiler Alert)An extinct animal, known as the Tasmanian tiger, has been spotted somewhere in an isolated place and Martin David is assigned to find and kill it. He poses as a university biologist while staying with a family in their home, Lucy Armstrong and her two children, Katie and Jamie. Lucy’s husband, Jarrah, disappeared while going up to the mountains and the children know he was up there looking for an animal. Lucy is ill and lies in bed. Jack Mindy, who has been checking up on the family, shows up to take Martin up to the mountains and guide him. After they get to the top Martin informs Jack that he can take it from there because he wants to be on his own. Martin spends the next two weeks camping and exploring the place, setting up traps and hunting for food. After that Martin drives back down to the house. Martin helps around the house, like cleaning the bathtub and repairing the electricity. Lucy is starting to feel better. Lucy sees what she believes to be her husband when really it’s Martin. She goes back to bed. Martin has to go back up to the mountains so he tells the kids how to take care of their mother. Martin continues to look for the animal he is after and finds clues of its whereabouts from a cave. When Martin is with the family he starts to grow a bond with them. Jamie shows Martin a drawing he did of the Tasmanian tiger and lets him keep it. Martin notices that Lucy is looking better. Dangerous men show up while the family is having a little get together with friends and then leave. Martin wonders if they have something to do with Jarrah. Lucy does tell Martin that Jarrah did believe someone was following him and that he pissed off a lot of people. Jack Mindy informs Martin’s boss that he is becoming a bit of a problem after thinking there is something suspicious going on. In the bush, Martin finds the remains of who he believes is Jarrah Armstrong after finding one of Jamie’s drawings in his pocket. He discovers that Red Leaf logo is on the paper. Martin doesn’t tell Lucy and the children that Jarrah is dead. He does question Lucy about what kind of work Jarrah was doing. Jarrah’s job was hunting that Tasmanian tiger Martin is looking for, but Jarrah ended up disobeying the people he was working for. Martin puts it together and figures that because Jarrah didn’t do his job, he was assassinated and Martin was hired to take over. Martin wants to take the family on a picnic the next day, but he gets a phone call from his boss who tells him to finish the job. Martin has to cancel the picnic and go back up. While continuing his search, Martin gets attacked by an assassin who wants Martin to lead him to the cave. Martin guides and lures the assassin into one of his traps. Martin takes his gun and shoots the assassin dead. Martin returns to house to see it has been burnt up and that Lucy and Katie were killed in it. Martin returns to the mountains and finally finds the Tasmanian tiger. Martin puts an end to it’s life by putting a bullet in it. Martin is not happy for what he has done. He cremates the animal and spreads the ashes on top of the mountain. Martin calls his boss and informs him that the animal they were looking for is gone forever, so that no one else has to die. Martin goes his own way after that and finds Jamie, who survived the fire, at a school. Jamie runs to Martin with joy and hugs him. 
Blaine: Martin was supposed to capture the Tasmanian tiger, get samples of it’s DNA and then kill it so no one else can get a hold of it’s DNA. Red Leaf is a military biotech company. The Martin character starts off as some kind of a loner assassin and he has no background and Willem Dafoe read the book to see if he could get any info on this character, but there wasn’t much. He’s just someone who is doing his job, but he spends a lot of time with this family and they grow on him and he feels love for them. Willem Dafoe was one of the people on the short list to play the character, Martin, and he was in mind while the script was in the works. The film was shot in Tasmania and Willem said shooting there was fantastic and he probably wouldn’t have done the movie if they hadn’t shot it there because it roots the story. It’s a very far place to be and that’s what Willem loved about it and he wouldn’t have wanted to do the project if it was shot in a backlot in LA. Willem said the location was at the center of the story and really rooted what the story was. That’s what I love the most about “The Hunter” is because it’s an interesting location to shoot a movie. Willem said it was very important to learn these bush craft things, the attitude of a guy who is actually a hunter, a way of moving through the bush and Willem had talked to some traditional hunters how to set up traps and all the other things the character does in the movie, but the most important thing for Willem was to learn how to make snares because there’s a lot of that in “The Hunter”. Director Daniel Nettheim thought of the book as an intimate story, but with an epic backdrop. He also thought of it as a story of isolated lonely people finding a connection and the question is "it possible to find redemption when you've lived an amoral life?" Is it possible for people to have another chance in life? It was a kind of fanatic quest about the book that interested Daniel to turn Julia Leigh's book into a film and that it was very strong. The question that poses through both the script and film is “is there a Tasmanian Tiger still out there and can we bring it back?" Martin feels terrible for killing the Tasmanian tiger because when he finally encounters it, he realizes it is the last of it’s kind and it is one of God’s creatures. Killing it is like he has killed himself. It wasn’t easy for him, but he did it anyway. In the end it’s possible Martin will adopt Jamie because he needs someone to look after him now that his whole family is dead. And Martin is the closest thing to a father Jamie has. My rating on "The Hunter" is five out of five. |