SIFF Review: The Wild Hunt

Before the screening of The Wild Hunt, director Aleandre Franchi described his motivation for making the film as a rejection of modern cinematic mythology, wherein heroes are perfect beings "out of touch with the human condition," in contrast to ancient mythology, which had flawed gods and hereos.

The characters of Hunt pretend to be heroes of ancient mythology — Viking warlords, Celtic shamans, King Arthur, elven princesses — and Franchi hits the modern human condition on the head, as these characters have many flaws, their attempts to escape to these mythological worlds being chief among them.

Read the rest of the review after the jump.

Erik cares for his alcoholic and ill father whilst his brother Bjorn pretends to be an devotee of the Viking god Thor as part of a massive live action role-playing (LARP) community in the Canadian wilderness. Evelyn, Erik's girlfriend and a Viking princess, escapes into this world to free herself from Erik and his problems. However, Erik can't let her go and he relunctantly journeys into the LARP fantasy world in order to find her.

These games have gotten some attention in the past couple years, notably in the climax of the film Role Models. In LARP games, people dress up in period and fantasy costumes and assume a fantasy persona, all while fighting with padded weapons and obeying a complex series of sparring, magic and decorum rules. To many, like Erik, it's a Dungeons & Dragons game gone too far. For others, it's the best part of the year.

The film bounces between these two perspectives. At once the game is utterly ridiculous, as when Bjorn will not break from his Viking persona even when hearing of his father's terrible physical condition. At other times it is a vehicle for sharing genuine emotion, such as when Bjorn makes Erik swear on the hammer of Thor (a poorly decorated sledgehammer) that he will journey on a quest to reclaim his ex-girlfriend Evelyn from the Celtic Shaman. Yes — it's a fantasy quest — but the emotional intent is tantamount to any person trying to win their girlfriend back.

Actual emotion, flaws intact, becomes the increasing motivator for the characters' game play, and the phony quests and weapons become all the more real until the film descends into complete chaos on par with Lord of the Flies, the details of which are graphic and tragic, possibly more so because of how pathetic so many of the characters are.

In the end we learn, unfortunately: the real world can't be escaped, because problems and emotions go with you, no matter who you are.

But Franchi's film is even more about how the idealization of other worlds and legends obscures the reality that must be faced despite modernity's mundaneness. Heroes of old may have had failings that made them more relatable, but they never used escapism like Wild Hunts' heroes — and the rest of us — do.

Ideals must be reconciled with natural human failings. The modern human condition is not only an existential crisis, but one in which there is no escape.