The Hunter is Rafi Pitts‘ newest film, starring Rafi Pitts himself.

Plot:
Ali (Rafi Pitts) returns home from prison to his wife (Mitra Hajjar) and daughter (Saba Yaghoobi) and a job as a night guard. His life is monotone and rather joyless, but it becomes even worse when he finds out that his wife and daughter have been killed in a shooting between police and protesters. In his desperation, Ali takes his gun, shoots two policemen and flees into the woods where he’s followed by two other policemen.

I’ve heard good things about this movie and I thought a political movie from Iran can only be interesting. But I was wrong. This movie is completely boring. imdb user mkviTDI probably put it best: “Any promising element succumbs to extreme minimalism, which, ironically, destroys the element of art in film making by trying to be so artistic. It’s not ambiguous, it’s vague. It’s not subtle, it’s empty. And it’s not patient, it’s boring.”

I actually fell asleep a couple of times during the movie. And I didn’t see a late showing or anything – my brain just tends to shut down when it’s dark and nothing happens. Ever. And it’s not only the movie where nothing happens, it’s also Rafi Pitts’ face.

His performance is completely stoic, which I’m not a big fan of anyway. There are only very few people who can pull that off [none come to mind, actually] and Rafi Pitts is not one of them, at least not in this film. [The whole thing reminded me of that one Takeshi Kitano movie which I only saw the first 15 minutes of because it was boring me out of my freaking mind.] Maybe I’m not subtle enough for that style of filmmaking. But somehow I doubt it.

The cinematography was pretty good though, and the foggy chase through the woods looked really nice. I also thought it was quite interesting to see Iran itself – you kinda never picture it to be a country with lush green woods, do you? But it actually looked like some parts of Austria do.

Anyway. I’m afraid that the political message of the film was wasted on me, mostly. I generally had some trouble understanding the film. I don’t know if it was because I missed important parts of the film while I was asleep or if again, the subtlety was lost on me or if the subtitles just were that bad. For example, I’m certain that I heard that Ali’s wife was shot in a robbery, not in a protest. But since every article I read about the film says that she was shot during the protests, I’m willing to accept that as truth.

Summarising: Yeah… no.