The Hunter (2010) is Iranian-British director Rafi Pitts’ follow-up to his acclaimed 2006 film It’s Winter. Again, we are in Iran, just before the elections. Progress is evident in the vast cranes that dominate the skyline, but the film’s opening shots reveal Tehran to be a concrete jungle, bleached of colour. There are endless traffic jams on its numerous highways, an unnerving cacophony of noise and importantly, a noticeable police presence.
Ali (Pitts) works nights as a security guard in a car factory. When he tries to change to the day shift so that he can spend more time with his wife and daughter, his boss tells him flatly no. Ali is lucky to have the job, the boss points out, particularly as he has only recently been released from prison. “What would happen if I worked days?” Ali retorts. In just this one short scenario, director Pitts immediately establishes the terrifyingly Kafkaesque world in which Ali inhabits.
It is already a bleak life, but when Ali loses his wife and daughter, apparently “caught in the crossfire between police and insurgents”, the full power of the state becomes starkly apparent. The callousness of the police who keep him waiting for hours before telling him of his wife’s death, the endless bureaucracy he struggles against when searching for his daughter, the wretchedness of the morgue where he has to identify his wife and daughter all conspire to send Ali over the edge. Finally, armed with his hunting rifle, Ali takes a sniper’s position overlooking the highway and kills two cops, before being forced on the run. The pace of the film than ratchets up as helicopters thunder overhead, with a car chase up a foggy mountainside proving particularly memorable.
The Hunter is a powerful evocation of an oppressive state, of a people who are as likely to suffer at the hands of their fellow countrymen than from any outside force. A superb political drama.
