Manhunt

Slawek and I went to the cinema the other day. We watched Manhunt, a 2008 film directed by Patrik Syversen. The movie does not concentrate on flashy special effects but on good, traditional gore and terror. It is a typical, generic, backwoods, surival horror movie.

The basic plot goes like this:

It is 1974. A group of friends travel across Norway's forests in a camper van. They stop at a dilapidated petrol station and, unsurprisingly, get involved in an argument with some locals. After the row, they pick up a hitchhiker, a distressed woman who is anxious to quickly leave the station and get on the road. The group does not get very far, though. They are hunted through the Norwegian forests and systematically murdered in the deep woods by three crazed men. 

The film is short (it lasts only 80 minutes) and has a very limited dialogue. The hunters, for instance, do not say a word throughout the entire movie. The movie is not filled with a great deal of a typical slasher horror tension. As an alternative, the director uses an almost physical sense of dread and fear. The use of particular sonic elements adds to the terror of the film. Whistles, disruptive horns, screams, groans, sounds of cracking branches and rustling dry leaves help create feelings of fright and intimidation. The threatening, imminent tragedy is evidently close thanks to some rough camerawork. The use of a hand-held, shaky camera makes the world of all the young people very small and claustrophobic, even though they are in a very big forest. The grainy and grimmy film stock adds to a gloomy, realistic atmosphere.

Manhunt is bloody and the special effects are good and realistic: bullet wounds, injuries, dismembered bodies, intestines. It is a sadistic movie; it is brutal and cruel. You are tied very directly into the experience and the hunters' enjoyment of the killings gives you a sense of some sort of strange, uncomfortable voyeurism.

Manhunt is not one of those huge, expensive, blockbuster Hollywood productions. It is a foreign, low-budget, independent movie. I have really enjoyed it and, I must admit, it has been nice to finally watch something different for a change.