Hysteria and a charge of sexual abuse - The Hunt

Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt (2012) is absolutely gripping and will keep you engaged and on edge from its first shot (a group of drunken Danish middle-aged guys carousing at a wilderness hunting lodge) to its last, which I won't divulge. That makes it a totally successful psychological social drama, but whether that makes it a great movie or even a movie you'd want to see is another question. That depends on your capacity for enduring disturbance - and moral ambiguity. The film is in essence about a 42-year-old father, just divorced, apparently unsuccessful in whatever his career was (seems financially pretty comfortable) now working in a kindergarten (seems more like what we would call a preschool). Through a series of incidents, the man, Lucas (the excellent Mads Mikkelsen, also great in A Royal Affair) is charged with sexually abusing one of the children - we know that the charge is unfounded, and we also know that Lucas is very vulnerable to the charge, as man living alone, and known for kind of rough, physical play with the kids. By the nature of his job, there is body contact - we see in an early scene that he helps clean a child after the child has a bowel movement. So when a child wrongly accuses him (she's a very troubled young girl who'd seen a porno video that her teenage brother handed her) the charge quickly accelerates to hysteria - largely because the head of the school and a counselor handle this terribly - asking the girl leading questions; calling in all parents and asking them to watch for any signs of disturbance. One thing very disturbing about this story is the possible implication that charges of sexual abuse are often unfounded - I believe that's not true, that more than likely most incidents are never reported because of fear, shame, confusion. On the other hand, the film is a warning as to how a criminal charge can quickly become mass hysteria that can lead to ostracism or worse - that's really what the film is about, the effect of the incident and its aftermath on Lucas/Mikkelson, his family, his friends, the whole community. There are some incredibly tense and dramatic confrontations, one or two of them physical but most of them verbal, emotional - with typical Scandinavian understatement and then sudden bursts of passion and violence. This film would have a much wider audience if there were an American re-make, but that's unlikely given the sensitive and disturbing nature of the subject; it is a Golden Globes nominee and will possibly be an Oscar nominee as well. The Hunt may also recall for some the fine novel and British film Atonement, which also centered on an unjust charge of sexual abuse - though that one by a much older girl, who should have born some responsibility for her actions and instead carried the guilt inside of her for the rest of her life.