Every culture has its own mystical, mythical
creatures. The English have their grindylow;
the Irish their leprechaun; the
Americans have bigfoot; the German
their doppelgänger; the Greeks have
their cyclops and gorgon; the Scandinavians their kraken; the Arabs have djinns; the Slavs have vampires; the Scots have the Loch Ness monster; the Jewish have their
leviathan; the Japanese have oni; while we, the Hindus have our danavas, rakshasas, and icchadhaari
nags.
In his second directorial venture, Trolljegeren a.k.a. TrollHunter (2010) the Norwegian director André Øvredal has brought
to life a similar legendary creature from Nordic folklore—the troll, which is
typically a hideous cave-dwelling being that is as old as the mountains and
forests in which it dwells.
Narrated in a found-footage format—a
genre pioneered by Ruggero Deodato in his notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1980); that includes The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal
Activity (2007), REC (2007), Cloverfield (2008), and Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)—we are
informed via a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that what we are about
to see is an uncut version of almost five hours of footage found in two hard
drives. Unlike most other examples of this particular genre, which jar the
senses and leave behind a feeling of motion sickness due to the epileptic
seizures that seem to grasp the camera in a stranglehold every now and then, the
found-footage style actually works for Trolljegeren.
This is simply because it treats the narrative style not as a gimmick, but as a
visual representation of its basic premise—fairy tales.
After all, in our childhood, those
stories were brought to life by someone else—our parents or even our
grandparents—who read them to us. We saw in our mind’s eye what they described
while narrating the awe-inducing worlds hidden within those pages. In Trolljegeren, we see what three college
students: Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterus), Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and Kalle
(Tomas Alf Larsen) encountered while they accompanied Hans (Otto Jespersen), an
unsung hero of Norway—a hunter whose identity and profession are both a
national secret—in his perilous missions aboard his UV-floodlight equipped,
armoured with iron spikes Land Rover.
It is a classic fairytale set up. Three
characters, who depict our mind (Thomas, the reporter), eyes (Kalle, the
cameraman), and our ears (Johanna, the sound recordist) befriend an intrepid
hunter of mythical creatures and embark on the adventure of their lifetime. As
the trio gradually eases their way into Hans’ life and livelihood, we, too,
find ourselves warming up to this gruff, physically scarred man, and beginning
to buy into his eccentricities.
We learn how Hans, an ex-Navy man, is the
sole troll hunter in the whole of Norway
But such pedantic knowledge pale in
comparison to the first-hand experience of coming face-to-face with a
three-headed tusseladd. The initial
fear of having a giant creature stomping towards the camera while uttering a
blood-curdling roar soon makes way to the glee that follows the realisation
that the bedtime stories one had listened in rapt attention to during our
childhood were in fact true! We find this emotion writ large on Johanna’s face
once Hans calcifies the monstrous creature using UV ray floodlights. Øvredal
had, in fact, portended that the character who would be the first to embrace the
fact that trolls could be around us had to be Johanna when he had focused on
her playing with a stuffed tiger that looked like Hobbes. Surely, a girl who
believes in a talking tiger would be more susceptible to a towering troll!
Like a seasoned storyteller, the
two-film-old Øvredal, and his co-writer Håvard S Johansen are both aware that the spine of any
story, fairy tale or otherwise, is conflict. While the clash between man and
beast is evident in the title of the film itself—with a reference to the adverse
effect of global warming on flora, fauna, and wildlife thrown in for good
measure—there are other, more subtle, allusions, as well. Hans reveals he hates
his job, not so much because the pay is meagre and he has to work nights, but
because he regrets having to massacre pregnant, and even young trolls, who can
barely walk. At a more broad level, the perpetual discord between fantasy and
reality—and our preponderance to find a ‘natural solution’ to everything—is
brought to the fore when Øvredal offers a faux-scientific
explanation to why trolls cannot stand sunlight and any other source of
ultraviolet radiation. It is as if sunlight is a metaphor for the light of
knowledge and rationality that turns these walking mythical creatures into
immobile rubbles of stone. And therein lies a similarity with us. While for
humans it is ashes to ashes and dust to dust, these concrete-eating creatures
return to stone.
In keeping with the fairy tale flavour,
Øvredal has also peppered his film with humour. It is impossible to keep a
straight face when a ghillie suit
attired Hans burst out of the jungle screaming ‘Trolls!’ or when a Polish guy
expresses in broken English his desire not to ask questions because it might
lead to problems he would love to avoid by uttering, ‘Why problem make when you
know problem have you don’t want to make?’ Perhaps, the best example of
humour occurs at the fag end of the film. In sync with the essence of Trolljegeren, which mixes fantasy with reality, Øvredal takes an actual footage of a
press conference by the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, where he had
mentioned the word ‘troll’. Though the context was different—the politician was
actually referring to an oilfield beyond the Norwegian coast, which has the
same name as the mythical creature—the innovative editing does elicit smiles.
As a filmmaking fraternity, the Nordic
industry has been experiencing a second coming of late. In 2009, Norway
