UK Release Date: 09-09-2011
Starring: Otto Jespersen, Johanna Morck
UK Certificate: 15
Director: André Øvredal
Country: Norway
Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Even when you’ve have heard a lot of promising things about a film, you simply don’t know what to expect. It can leave you feeling deeply disappointed or simply walking away with shoulder-shrugging indifference. Or it can turn out to be an absolute cinematic joy. Troll Hunter falls into the last category. It has a simple premise: a group of young guerrilla film students set off to find an elusive hunter who, it seems, is killing all the rogue bears in the Norwegian mountains, to the chagrin of the licensed hunters in the area. When the students eventually track him down and follow him into the woods one night, the truth of his profession proves far more fantastical and terrifying than the students could ever imagine. When “TROOOOOOOOOLL!” is bellowed at them from deep within the murky midnight woods (and at us from out of the screen) by the titular ‘Troll Hunter’ (an excellent performance from Otto Jespersen, utterly believable as a grizzled, gnomic, world-weary but masterly wilderness man) the film never lets up, each encounter with creatures supposed to exist only in Norwegian folklore more gobsmacking and dangerous than the last.

The vérité style employed by director André Øvredal has no more an air of verisimilitude than either The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, but crucially it exists perfectly comfortably and believably within the bounds of its own reality. The landscapes are captivating, with journeys by road up and into the misty, rain-drenched mountains of Norway in search of the next troll encounter and finally to a snow-capped, wind scarred peak at the film’s magnificent climax. There is no growing rift between the protagonists of Troll Hunter of the kind that was so vital in giving Blair Witch an edge to offset the otherwise endless trudging about the woods. It’s the inhospitable environment which provides the edge in Troll Hunter and it is presented to us with considerable atmospheric flair. Add to this a government cover-up and a bunch of young film makers who become increasingly more of a dangerous nuisance than they are aware and the mixture of volatile elements is satisfyingly rendered.

Trolls, according to lore, can sniff out Christian believers, but if you are of the pagan persuasion, it seems, you might just be spared being eaten. Troll Hunter is by turns jocular and unsettling, driven by an absorbing, wordless visual narrative for much of its running time, punctuated by sudden, shocking events and awe-inspiring visuals. Nothing in the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes – for all its multi-million-dollar mega-budget CGI – can match the sight of the troll hunter squaring up to a 200ft (60m)-high troll at the film’s awesome climax as the creature appears over a snow-blasted horizon. For once, an overused and much abused phrase is entirely apt: jaw-dropping. Absolutely jaw-dropping.

There are already rumours of a sequel and – pagan gods forbid – a US remake. Some films are so brilliantly simple in their conception and simply brilliant in their execution that they should be left alone. I’m still up on that snow-blasted, wind-scarred mountain summit, squaring up to a gigantic troll, and there ain’t nothing going to top that. My film of the year so far. “TROOOOOOOOOLL!”