Director: André Øvredal
Starring: Otto Jespersen, Robert Stoltenberg, Knut Nærum
****
If, as the centuries old legend suggests, a troll can "smell the blood of a Christian", can it do the same with a Muslim? This is just one of the frankly ludicrous questions raised with a straight face in the singular Norwegian faux-documentary, Troll Hunter.
It is pondered by the film's characters after one of their number, a Christian cameraman, is eaten by one of the giant mythical monsters. His replacement not unreasonably asks whether her Islamic faith could mean she is similarly endangered. But Troll Hunter is not a story about religious belief or persecution. It is simply a film that treats the details of Scandinavian troll myths as scientific facts and expands upon them with rare wit and originality.
In the movie, the monsters are very real and dangerous (although their existence is known about by just a few and covered up by the authorities). Wandering Norway's remote forests and mountains, they are treated like pests and their numbers regularly thinned by a capable but weary troll hunter, Hans (Jespersen).
So tired of the job is Hans that he welcomes the assistance of a documentary camera crew from a nearby university, so that they can expose the inhumane conditions in which he is made to carry out his work.
With its deadly serious approach, the film expertly delivers moments of black comedy within a landscape of restrained horror and fantasy. A more traditionally comical approach would in, all likelihood, have worn away at these elements without actually making the film any funnier.
Like The Blair Witch Project and Cannibal Holocaust before it, the film's shaky camera and slow build may feel alienating at first, but the story eventually reveals an emotional and intellectual complexity that one would never expect from something called Troll Hunter.
