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Review – Troll Hunter Is A Joyfully Demented Nature Mockumentary

I recently went for a day out at London Zoo, and I'm glad to say that I learnt a thing or two about nature while I was there.  I learnt that nature can be beautiful, that it can be frightening and majestic, and I learnt that nature can be fragile and fluctuating. But above all I learnt that most of the time, nature is just downright silly (don't believe me? Try searching for "axolotl" or "blobfish" in Google images and see what comes up). Spend too much time looking closely at penguins or giraffes or duck-billed platypi and you will find yourself starting to think, "Oh come on, nature, you can't really be serious?"

On that note, let's talk about The Troll Hunter, a film about nature at its very silliest.

Because despite what the trailer and posters might have lead you to believe, Troll Hunter is not a horror film. In fact I don't think it's even a monster movie. What it is, is difficult to describe, but this is the closest I can manage: imagine if David Attenborough took copious amounts of psychotropic drugs then went to go see The Muppet Show, lying flat on his back so that all the muppets looked like giants. That's The Troll Hunter, and it's every bit as entertaining as it sounds.

The film follows a group of three student documentary filmmakers, Thomas (Glenn Erlund Tosterud), Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) and Johanna (Johanna Mørck), who begin investigating a man who at first seems to simply be a bear hunter operating without a license, but who turns out to be a troll hunter names Hans (Otto Jespersen), who is working for the Norwegian government in an effort to keep Norway's troll population a secret by monitoring their movements and culling them where necessary.

It was probably at this point that director André Øvredal stopped and thought to himself, "well, this is a film about big hairy trolls, all well over 30 feet tall, some of whom have three heads and some of whom have noses shaped like cocks, and a bearded man who goes hunting for them with a heavy-duty flashlight as his only weapon. It's probably not a good idea to play it too seriously."

I wouldn't necessarily call the film a comedy, but there are a lot of laugh-out-loud funny moments in it and the overall tone is definitely tongue-in-cheek. Strangely, this approach pushes past the ludicrous concept and makes the existence of trolls seem not only believable, but almost feasible. This is compounded by the fact that Hans speaks of the trolls as if they are just another of nature's oddities, as opposed to being something out of a fairy-tale; at one point he takes a blood sample from a sickly troll and hands it over to a veterinarian so that she can examine it under a microscope.

The trolljegeren also explains that the trolls are mammals like us, describes their feeding and mating patterns, and even provides a scientific explanation for why they turn to stone in sunlight.

Otto Jespersen's performance is what sells the story. When I heard the title of the film, I pictured something along the lines of Tallahassee from Zombieland: a gruff, no-nonsense, one-liner-spitting, gun-toting cowboy. Gruff and grizzled he may be, but Hans' temperament is not that of a fearsome monster-slayer. Rather, he comes across as just a rather tired man who has been doing a dirty and gruelling job for a very long time with no thanks and little in the way of reward, and his stolid, matter-of-fact approach to troll-hunting makes him seem more like a park ranger than anything else.

The filmmakers themselves are somewhat less memorable, their main function being merely eyes and ears to tell the story, but Thomas, the presenter of the documentary, exudes a contagious enthusiasm and Kalle is concealing a secret that leads up to a shocking payoff.

The Troll Hunter is yet another addition to the "found footage" style of filmmaking that has been growing in popularity ever since The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, but André Øvredal acknowledges the fact that no one would ever be fooled into thinking the footage was real, and the framing notes about the discovery of the footage and the subsequent investigation satirise the genre very effectively.

At times I found the old shaky-cam running-through-the-forest style to be both grating and a little dull, not to mention hard on the stomach, but then the adventurers entered into a climactic chase-fight with the largest species of troll, all shown in a POV shot from a truck weaving madly around the troll's enormous hairy feet, and the stylistic choice was immediately redeemed.

The film has a few faults, of course. It takes a while to pick up any momentum, and the first half hour or so is spent mainly following the lacklustre filmmakers as they try, unsuccessfully, to get an interview with Hans. There are no real scary moments, so if you go into the cinema expecting a horror film then you're likely to be disappointed. Some have criticised the special effects, saying that the trolls don't look nearly realistic enough, like, um, real trolls do. Personally, I found that the special effects were one of the best things in the film; the trolls look silly, for sure, but they definitely have their own character and they blend seamlessly into their environments thanks to the matching of their colour palettes (greeny-brown trolls in the forest, ice-pale trolls in snowy arenas and murky grey trolls in caves).

Despite its drawbacks, The Troll Hunter is unique, funny and thrilling. If you have a high threshold for withstanding weirdness then it's definitely worth a watch.

You can hunt trolls in UK cinemas from September 9th.

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