A group of students investigates a series of mysterious bear killings, but learns that there are much more dangerous things going on. They start to follow a mysterious hunter, learning that he is actually a troll hunter.
10 Feb Troll Hunter (2010)
Petrified and Exploding Legacy
Wow.
This is yet another folding of a movie being made into the movie we see, but with the deliberate dissonance of ‘Blair Witch.‘
The game in such things is to play off the difference among layers. Blair did that well, I think. It established a solid distance between us and the film, forcing us to use that same distance between what we saw of the filmmakers and what we saw of ‘the evil.‘ This does something similar, if you are not Norwegian, so is a poor example.
But (from what I understand), if you are Norwegian, then the effect is inverted because the inner story is the one that is more familiar. The dynamic works in reverse in this case, and it is the outer film that is given verity. Craftily, the writers amplify this by providing numerous science fiction-inspired explanations for why things are as they are, for example why trolls explode when exposed to light.
I‘m so very impressed by this because it shows a narrative sophistication that takes the folk tales and presents them in a more elegant way structurally than, say, the Danes.
Among the Nordic countries, Norway has always been stereotyped as a nation of simple folk: lumberjacks, fishermen and the chubby women they come home to. The history is about whether they were worth conquering and whose turn it was. (I visited for a conference on concept harmonisation and was treated rudely because I have a Swedish surname!) Now that Norway has the bounty of oil money, they shrewdly enter the world with a theme of high sophistication turned toward self deprecating humour. It’s pretty sweet.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
No Comments