When Troll Hunter first showed up on my radar, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic. I mean sure, the plot sounded interesting — a covert government organization whose sole purpose is to control Norway’s not-entirely-secret population of trolls — but the fact that it was yet another “found footage from a crew of film student documentarians” turned me off. I cannot count “point of view” films among the styles of filmmaking for which I possess much favor. They work for many people but, most of the time, not for me. However, people I trusted suggested that maybe this time I might find things to be different. Even then I was hesitant; people told me the same thing about Cloverfield, and that didn’t really pan out for me. In the end, no amount of misgiving was going to actually prevent me from watching a movie about a harried bureaucrat who has to deal with renegade trolls, especially when I saw that the trolls were rendered not as some terrifying new style monster, but as big-nosed, lumbering galoots they’d always been drawn as in old fairy tales. And it turns out that this time it paid off.
Troll Hunter is a very entertaining film. It rises above the “found footage” nature of the filming, largely because for once the film student “found footage” that makes up the movie looks like it was shot by actual film students — you know, people who are trying to set up and properly frame a shot while holding the camera steady instead of every single frame looking like it was filmed with the camera strapped to one of those vibrating machines that was supposed to help people in the 1960s jiggle off their weight. There are still more of the “flail the camera wildly as we all run in terror” shots than I’d like, but there are a lot fewer than usual, so I guess that’s something.
The filmmakers in this case start out shooting a documentary about hunters searching for a bear that has been wreaking havoc in the Norwegian countryside. They soon notice that one of the hunters, Hans (Otto Jespersen), keeps to himself and seems to be going about an entirely different mission than his fellow hunters. The rest of them dismiss Hans as a scummy poacher, and the filmmakers decide he’d be a more interesting subject than most of the gun-toting yahoos they’ve been interviewing. At first, Hans is unenthusiastic about the crew’s interest in him and does his grumpy best to shoo them away. When it becomes obvious that they’re going to keep pestering him, he basically says “screw it” and tells them everything: he’s not a poacher, and there’s no bear. He’s a government agent, and the damage is being caused by a troll. Irritated by the bureaucracy in which he works, and annoyed by the way he’s been treated by his superiors, Hans holds nothing back. The filmmakers assume, of course, that he’s insane but can’t pass up the opportunity to ride shotgun when Hans goes troll hunting. Which is when they learn that everything he’s told them is true.
Usually, the trouble with trolls is minimal. Hans and the organization for which he works don’t understand why the trolls are suddenly running rampant and out of control. Hans does his job, but he’s not particularly happy about killing trolls. He wants to figure out what’s happened to rile them up. Throughout the narrative, mostly through interviews with Hans, the mythology of trolls is doled out: they love to eat rocks and old tires, they can smell the blood of a Christian, and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes — from largish under-the-bridge style trolls to massive, Godzilla-sized mountain trolls. The trolls are rendered via CGI which makes them look almost like stop-motion animation. Most of the effects are wonderful, and they’re aided by the fact that much of the film is shot in dim light or on bleak, snow-swept landscapes that help mask the shortcomings of computer animation. Traditional troll folklore is also mixed in with the modern setting — power lines, for instance, rope off the troll reserves, since no troll wants to get near them. Explanations of troll mythology and habits are given with such straight-faced authority by Hans that by the end of the movie, you’ll pretty much believe in trolls.
One of the worst things about point-of-view movies is the need for most of them to make the people behind and in front of the camera annoying. Troll Hunter avoids this, giving us instead a cast of young characters who are likable and mostly believable. The mix of fear and joy they experience after their first run-in with a troll is charming, and for the most part, there’s none of the on-screen sniping and nastiness to which so many other POV films seem addicted. Even when the characters do something dumb, it’s believable — like the guy who risks being killed by a troll because he was too embarrassed to admit to his friends that he believes in God, which in turn leads to a pretty good joke where they hire a new camera person, a Muslim woman, and then worry whether trolls can smell Muslim blood as well.
Norwegian comedy is, let’s say, subdued, and that works when dealing with such a fantastical subject. The movie’s tone is perfect, capturing the terror and exhilaration of the students, the tedium Hans endures as he fills out paperwork after a job is finished, and a subtle undercurrent of melancholy that these bizarre, mythical creatures are vanishing from the world. Otto Jespersen, a former Communist radical turned controversial comedian (just look at the list of sacred icons he’s burned on stage!), plays Hans with a world-weary gravitas that sells you on everything he says, no matter how out there. Troll control is a bureaucratic grind. The organization he works for is utterly believable because it’s so banal, cluttered with tired employees and tons of requisition forms — it’s like Harry Palmer started hunting monsters.
The film’s one weakness is the ending, which is abrupt and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as the ending, but I guess that’s the nature of “and then they vanished without a trace.” Luckily, the rest of the movie is a delight, and any disappointment I felt over the ending is assuaged by the remarkably exciting finale preceding it involving a gigantic mountain troll. Seriously, watching that thing gallop across that dramatic, desolate Norwegian mountainscape — it’s really one of the best giant monster movie moments in a long time. By the time the movie sputters to an end, and despite the POV style, I was a believer in Troll Hunter.
Suburban Pagans 