IMDb #120 Review: The Hunt (2012)

Source: Wikipedia

Pedophilia is a touchy subject.

Joking aside, this scenario is my nightmare. A forty-something single man working in a day care (already an awful idea) gets accused of abusing a kid in his day care. With his man-parts. And everybody believes the confused little person whose brain hasn't even fully developed yet.

Recipe for a ruined life. Combine a precocious kindergarten girl; her porn-crazed older brother; poorly phrased comments to the worst person imaginable, a paranoid old lady; and a provincial community of inflammatory idiots. At least the other kids have the excuse of being young and dumb when they hop aboard the hunt-the-pedo bandwagon.

He loses his job. His girlfriend. Visitation rights to his young son. Friends and family shun him. the community ostracizes him, the the point where he can't shop at the grocery store without risk of bodily assault. He can't replace the windows fast enough before more rocks crash through. And anybody who dares sympathize with the (alleged!) pervert suffer the same fate.

Most horrifying is the sheer plausibility, crystallized by convincing delivery from a talented cast. (Mads Mikkelsen is a madman.) Just watching fake things happen makes you irrationally furious.

Soon the little girl who inadvertently kicked off this madness can't dissuade the modern mob from their kangaroo-court vigilante justice.

And this shit goes on for a long time. Up till the saddest Christmas mass ever, when the outcast mere attendance makes a scene. (Then his impassioned plea for sanity makes the scene.)

The man's last shot at redemption is, pardon the poor taste in word choice, touching.

This kind of thing would never happen in America. They'd immediately boil him alive in a tub of HIV-positive hobo splooge. Which they keep on hand at all times for delicate cases such as this.

115 minutes.