Troll Hunter
Trolljegeren
*/****
starring Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alf Larsen
written and directed by André Øvredal
by Jon Thibault According to WIKIPEDIA, the "found-footage" genre was invented with 1980's Cannibal Holocaust, but it didn't pick up steam until 1999's The Blair Witch Project, which gained notoriety owing to its miniscule budget and profound, lasting creepiness. In the language of film, handheld, sloppy camerawork is associated with documentaries, making its use in horror particularly effective. Cannibal Holocaust is still considered a gore classic, and 2003's direct-to-DVD August Underground's Mordum is the most disturbing movie ever made, suspending the disbelief of the most sophisticated moviegoer with its potent coupling of brilliant special effects and the shittiest production values imaginable. But only Blair Witch's perfect storm of lo-res video, unscripted dialogue, and egregious camerawork won a massive audience, landing directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez on the cover of TIME and setting the standard to which everything remotely similar has been compared. It took almost ten years before audiences had forgotten enough about Blair Witch to be scared shitless by Paranormal Activity.
If the filmmaker has made a good found-footage movie, within a few minutes the viewer unconsciously recognizes that what he's watching looks exactly like his own shaky, half-assed home movies and buys into the reality of the experience. The filmmaker fails, however, when the movie's high production cost is too obvious, the writing too scripted, the camerawork too, well, cinematic. We can now also conclude that adding gigantic CG trolls doesn't help. In writer-director André Ovredal's aptly-named Trollhunter (Trolljegeren), we're made privy to the lost footage of three film students played by Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Morck, and Glenn Erland Tosterud. Through some dopey happenstance that's not worth going into, they follow and film a wary Grizzly Adams who, yes, hunts giant trolls that roam the Norwegian countryside. There is a tendency among critics to give undue latitude and praise to small (read: cheap) films, especially small foreign films, regardless of how much they suck. This makes the positive reviews of Trollhunter doubly perplexing, as it looks relatively expensive while unequivocally sucking.
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The opportunities for absurdist comedy are almost constant, but the few that are taken run the unfunny gamut from juvenile to ham-fisted. That Ovredal thinks flatulent trolls are hilarious is really all you need to know about his sense of humour and the comic intelligence of the movie in general. It's amusing when the titular hunter (Otto Jespersen–who, it should be noted, has made a name for himself in his home country as a total asshole) explains over breakfast the differences among trolls, e.g., when exposed to sunlight, some explode and others turn to stone. The amusement fades, however, when the same joke is later played out as a veterinarian gives a lengthy "scientific" explanation of why some trolls explode and others turn to stone. Nobody cares about the intricacies of troll innards in the same way that nobody cares about midi-chlorians.
The dialogue is standard horror-movie awful. While being chased through the forest by a 30-foot troll, one character helpfully yells to another, "Run!" As said troll passes by: "Did you see that?!" After said troll is turned to stone: "It turned to stone!" It's somewhat comforting that this level of moronic writing isn't limited to bad American films; unfortunately, it's equally cringe-inducing in Norwegian. And the actors saying these lines are only playing characters in the most perfunctory sense. We know that the troll hunter is a former soldier who hates his job, that the three documentarians are college students, and that the shady government worker (Hans Morten Hansen) is a bureaucrat (which we know because he's referred to as "a bureaucrat"). With no character development, we don't care if or when anyone dies, so we suffer through the dialogue and plot while expectantly prepping the proverbial jerk station. Alas, the troll sightings are few and far between, separated by yawns of radio-era exposition, boring treks through the Norwegian countryside (apparently, if you've been to Maine, you've been to Norway), and countless potentially funny but squandered scenarios.
Like 2010's The Last Exorcism, Trollhunter even manages to fail on its own terms. In the former, a single camera suddenly multiplies in order to cut to superfluous reaction shots. In the latter, there are bizarre, nonsensical pans made only to capture–yes–superfluous reaction shots. The reaction shot in this sense neatly identifies filmmakers who lack the confidence to avoid basic, trite movie language, even when it violates the rules of their own genre. See Cloverfield for an example of how it should be done: when faced with a giant space creature destroying New York, the kid holding the camera has the common sense to film the fucking thing. Then again, Cloverfield was a good movie, and not a lazy amalgamation of at least three better ones.
