Troll Hunter

Trolljegeren (2010)

Blair Witch style first person horror/fantasy flick about a group of students who are doing a documentary on dead bears or something, and decide to start following this dude (Otto Jesperen) only to learn that he is, in fact, a Troll Hunter. He hunts fucking trolls. Like, bonafide, under the bridge trolls.

There's not really much else to the movie - the camera crew follows him around while he travels here there and everywhere doing his job. The movie almost plays like a tourism ad for Norway with a few exploding trolls thrown in.. There wasn't a whole lot of character development, with the exception of the titular character. I didn't really feel that any of the film sudents were given a lot of depth - I didn't even really get why they were following him in the first place. He told them to fuck off so off they should have fucked.

That's generally the problem I find with these first person horror flicks which have been cropping up a lot lately. It's really hard to do proper character development and have it feel natural. You can't film all the time, and if you go that approach it seems really forced.

Also the run time is a little too long - most of the movie consists of the Troll Hunter and camera crew driving here and there and back again, which actually works for the majority of the movie but really started to get thin in the last fifteen or twenty minutes.

Other than that I thought this movie was fucking brilliant. The dialogue was clever but not smarmy, and the amount of consideration that was put in to making the trolls completely believable was kind of astounding, from descriptions of different types of trolls, to how trolls are to be killed. There's a troll veterinarian, and a government agency which covers up the fact that there are trolls. The effects were great but it was the troll hunter himself who made the trolls believable. It made sense that there would be trolls. Why the fuck not?

That actor, Otto Jesperen, I have no idea who he  is, some Norwegian guy presumably, but he was really good. The movie could have been unbelievably stupid if somebody not so good had been in the main role but he totally made me believe. Plus the character was probably the most badass of badasses.

Anyway, like I said, the effects were really quite impressive, the movie is well shot and the scenery is fucking gorgeous. It made me want to move to Norway, if it weren't for the damn trolls.

Long story short, I highly recommend this movie if you can get your hands on it, even if you're not into foreign language stuff, you won't regret it. Just the one scene of the Troll Hunter running up to the camera and yelling "TROOOOOOOLLLL!!!" is totally worth it. Check it out.

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Directed by: André Øvredal.  Written by: André Øvredal and Håvard S. Johansen.  Starring: Otto Jesperen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alk Larsen, Urmila Berg-Domaas, Hans Morten Hansen.