The Hunt

I watched The Hunt recently and could not get it out of my mind for days. There is nothing easy or simple about the story, no quick answers of resolutions. While the protagonist is the hunted man, the young child Klara is central to everything that happens in his life. She is a victim of abuse by way of neglectful parents who are too busy fighting with each other to know where she is, get her to school and back in any predictable way. 

Her older brother and his friends are opening watching porn and expose her to it. This child is begging to be loved and noticed by the adults in her life. This a household where children are unsupervised and boundaries have never been in place. Lucas gets much more than he bargained for when he steps in to fill the void (at least in some sense). It is awkward, mostly inadvertent and sets of a chain of events that are well beyond Klara's control. Ironically, she gets her parents to notice her existence and there for her even as Lucas's life falls apart. Fiction turns to fact and there is no turning back for anyone, even Theo (Klara's father) who know his best friend, Lucas is innocent. 

When a narrative, no matter how severely distorted takes hold in a close-knit community, there is no out. People have picked sides in the story and they have to live with it, no matter what the facts turn out to be. This is one of those situation. Might Lucas have been mostly innocent but not yet completely, might he have a little bit of latent sickness in him. It is easy to everyone who got caught up in the tumult of the events to believe that is indeed the case, so they feel justified in their outrage. For Lucas, no matter the verdict he cannot look at these people he knew to be friends and neighbors, the same ever again. Yet, the schools system mostly did the right thing, could have been a bit over-zealous but they can hardly be blamed for their hyper-vigilance. If some real harm had come to a child, there is no room for error.