Troll Hunter – Film Review

An ogre-abundance of fun

Release Date: 9 September 2011
15 | 104 minutes
Distributor: Momentum Pictures
Director: André Øvredal
Cast: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Mørck, Hans Morten Hanse

Low-budget Norwegian monster movie Troll Hunter is a “found footage” piece like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, although the film plays less like horror and more like bone-dry black comedy. We follow three student filmmakers tracking a mysterious “poacher” through the mountains of Norway. Turns out the guy is a troll hunter named Hans (played with weary resignation by top Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen). Hans secretly works for the Norwegian government, who have known about the existence of trolls for centuries. Tired of his crappy job, Hans breaks protocol and allows the kids to tag along and help find what’s been driving the local troll population out of their natural habitat.

Completely improvised by the players, the film gets plenty of comic mileage from the squelchy, workaday world of troll hunting. Treated like bothersome vermin, the trolls themselves come with their own set of fairytale rules, which are put to particularly suspenseful effect when the team are cornered in a cave full of flatulent behemoths. Complementing the movie’s wry humour is a scene in which Hans recalls one of the darker episodes in his career, underlining the fact that there exists a thin line between heroism and genocide in “monster-slayer” movies. Although the format perhaps forces the movie to conclude more abruptly than we may have liked, Troll Hunter is one of the most startling, inventive and witty fantasy films of recent years.

Alec Worley