alone in the Tasmanian wilderness - The Hunter

OK so Willem Dafoe is hired as the assasin to hunt down the last Tasmanian Tiger by a giant biotech company,wanting to harvest its DNA and retrieve the secret anaesthetic, used to immobilise its prey. The film opens in a Parisian hotel with big men in suits and thankfully we quickly fly to Hobart with Qantas and walk off the plane on to the tarmac - what a remembered treat! The scene is set for Tasmania; vast tracts of misty wilderness inhabited by the foresters who actually make a living felling those beatiful trees, the detested 'greenies' who get in the way as they protect the wilderness, and the alternative lifestylers, who often are also scientific researchers. We meet them all and get an understanding of the fragile balance of life way down south. This is also somewhat disrupted by a few crazy foreigners who are prepared to try their luck looking for the extinct tasmanian tiger, fuelled by some recent rumours of sightings - but no-one is prepared to admit this, for fear of losing the big scoop, if they finally find it - including, of course our solitary hunter, Dafoe. Although Dafoe is guided into the wilderness by a very rugged Sam Neill, he quickly decides to go further on his own...and this is when there are long silences as we are taken into the amazing natural beauty of the last wilderness. There is rain and snow, misty mountains and ridges and there is a building sense of lots of different agendas, some real and others imagined in this magnificent forest. As a visual alternative to the gradual hunting of the hunter in the forest, we see Dafoe coming back to stay and connect with a damaged family, who run the eco lodge. Frances O'Connor plays the grieving wife of the disappeared husband, while her two children run wild, a precocious young girl and her electively mute younger brother. Dafoe plays something of the missing father figure by fixing the generator, reviving the drugged mother and connecting with the young boy, who seems to know and draw something about the tiger. Of course, there is a forest chase, with a few rifle shots and a fantastic dreaming sequence but the ending is sufficiently open to allow a little existential reflection...