The Hunt (2012) Review

Lucas is newly divorced, working at the village kindergarten and slowly winning back his teenage son, when Klara, the small daughter of his best friend, gives him a present and a kiss, and he gently tells her no. Hurt, she repeats something from a pornographic picture her brother's friend showed her, the kindergarten head decides that children never lie about such things, a well-meaning interviewer asks leading questions, and within days the whole community knows what Lucas did. The audience knows he did nothing, which is the point: Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm are not interested in whodunit, only in how certainty spreads.

Mads Mikkelsen won Best Actor at Cannes for playing decency under siege, bewildered, then furious, then something harder. The supermarket beating and the Christmas church service, where he makes his oldest friend look into his eyes, are two of the most painful scenes Vinterberg has shot. Charlotte Bruus Christensen lights the village softly, which makes the cruelty worse, and Annika Wedderkopp's Klara is heartbreakingly ordinary.

A few procedural shortcuts smooth the plot along, but the final scene, set the following autumn, is the most frightening thing in it. It was nominated for the foreign language Oscar.