The Hunt - Opening and Closing Shots

There's a great moment in Thomas Vinterberg's Danish film The Hunt, when our protagonist Lucas, in a moment of utter desperation, grabs his best friend by the collar and pushes him to tell the church what he thinks Lucas did to his daughter. Lucas finally shouts "The whole town is listening". In one simple line of dialogue, the overarching theme of the film is echoed.

The Hunt is the kind of movie that leaves you motionless as you watch it, and the first time I saw it, I couldn't get it out of my head for days. In the most basic terms, The Hunt is about the immense dangers that can arise out of a situation being taken out of context. After six year old Klara, with an innocent crush on her teacher Lucas, is stung from his rejection, she makes a comment that leads an entire town into ostracizing him for a crime he didn't commit.

The opening and closing frames of a film are really important. Often, the opening frame visually introduces the theme, sets the tone and mood through lighting and composition, or it can set up character for the rest of the film. The final frame can often mirror some sense of an internal or external resolution for the protagonist, or lack thereof. In other words, the first and final shots of a film should parallel and display what the controlling idea of the film is.

In cases such as The Hunt, the final frame ends in relation to where it begins. The first and final frames are almost polar opposites, but similar in some ways.

Here's a still from the opening scene of the film:

The first frame symbolizes everything that is slowly deteriorated over the course of the film--brotherhood, a sense of community, and the often carefree nature of life in rural parts of a country. In a later shot from this scene, one of Lucas's friends strips down completely, and flings himself into the lake. There's a primitive sense to it, but it doesn't matter because they're having fun and Lucas is enjoying himself and everything is the way it's meant to be. The balance of Lucas's life has not yet been altered. Another thing to note is his separation from them. He's not physically in their group, he's submerged in the water, by himself. In a way, he can be seen as a fish in a tank, which he later becomes--scrutinized and under close watch by the entire town. The last thing to note is that this opening scene is incredibly loud and rambunctious, with the yells and chants of Lucas and his friends, which sharply contrasts the closing scene...

In the final scene of the film, a mysterious silhouette towers over Lucas, firing a shot straight at the back of his neck. We don't know who it was, whether it's a warning shot, or whether Lucas imagined it, but we're left with a chilling sense of uncertainty as we realize, even a year after he's been falsely accused of child abuse, he's still not off the hook. Although we're also left with a burning curiosity of whoever fired the shot, as a friend pointed out--it doesn't matter if we know who it was that pointed their rifle at Lucas--they are representative of the entire town. Everyone still looks at him in disgust, and they most likely always will. The final frame of the film is tonally very different from the first. Lucas stands alone in the silence of the wilderness, still isolated from his community. There are no sounds except the occasional rustling of wind and leaves. However, since the opening of the film, the primal instincts of the people of the town have not changed. He has become the deer that the Danish men hunt, and his notoriety has made him a target for the rest of his life. Much like the opening shot as well, he is still at a distance from the rest of his community -- a social pariah that still stands in the stoic dignity that he's maintained throughout the film.