‘Hunt’: Thessaloniki Review

Dir: Christos Pitharas. Greece. 2024. 73 minutes.

Watching the primary jiffy of Hunt, a thriller appears to be afoot. Yannis (non-professional Giannis Belis) heads out in his automotive at night time. As daybreak comes, he’s making his method by means of an autumnal woodland, shotgun on the prepared, looking thrushes. A mixture of amplified sound design, together with his laboured respiratory, handheld in- and out-of-focus camerawork from Thanos Liberopoulos and skittish reducing, lends the sequence an impressionistic rigidity. It’s virtually as if he’s being surveilled.

Pitharas’ general image of Greece is as far-off from a sun-kissed seaside postcard as you will get

Though Christos Pitharas’ second fiction characteristic shortly morphs right into a melancholy character examine of a person being pushed to the restrict, the depth of these opening moments is impressively maintained all through. Making its world premiere within the Meet The Neighbours competitors at Thessaloniki Movie Competition, Hunt’s plot beats could also be acquainted however Pitharas executes them economically with loads of type and rhythm, which ought to attraction to different festivals and, doubtlessly, streamers alongside the road.

The director’s 2018 nonfiction mid-length movie Sopi – A Day In beforehand screened in Thessaloniki’s sister documentary pageant and he returns to the southern Greek village of Sopi for a part of this drama. The completely smoking, unshaven Yannis, who already has a crumpled air, makes a sequence of visits there after the loss of life of his estranged mom.

His guilt over their estrangement presents a simmering undercurrent as he additionally faces pressures elsewhere. On the workshop the place he’s employed, Yannis and his boss Makis (Meletis Georgiadis) try to fulfill an impending order whereas, again at his flat, he’s being more and more set on edge by the fixed barking and whining of the canine that belongs to his disagreeable neighbour Elias (Vasilis Anastasiou).

The canine, Mal, is a pitbull kind however, a lot to Elias’ disdain, a sweetie. The mutt spends its days and nights caught on the neighbouring balcony when not struggling abuse by the hands of his proprietor – fortunately, for animal lovers, heard fairly than seen. Makes an attempt by Yannis to assist the canine, in the meantime, are met with threats from Elias.

Pitharas retains us with Yannis, utilizing visuals as a lot as dialogue to recommend his loneliness, which is magnified by means of the boxy and claustrophobic academy ratio. The director additionally makes even handed use of impressionistic dream sequences to intensify the sense of the character’s inside turmoil. The shift in tone is enhanced by the guitar-driven scoring from Dinos Tselis and Anna Komianou, which makes use of percussion to ship rigidity when referred to as for. Pitharas’ general image of Greece is as far-off from a sun-kissed seaside postcard as you will get, brooding with thunder and the specter of an emotional storm.

The spare nature of Yannis’ life makes the small print stand out. When you’ve no person to return house to, feeding a slice of meat to a canine carries a promise of longed-for connection, whereas a bit of ungifted however rigorously crafted jewelry in a coat pocket carries with it the load of unfulfilled hope.

The movie’s trim size could make for a distilled story nevertheless it doesn’t go away a lot room for improvement of the subsidiary characters, who’re primarily referred to as upon to stress the contours of Yannis’ existence. The director additionally struggles to completely combine a subplot concerning Yannis’ inheritance into the broader scheme of issues.

But when there’s a sure predictability to the plot it feels borne out of actuality fairly than cliche. That sense of the true world is anchored by Belis, who like his character is a blacksmith by commerce. Village conversations even have a documentary tenor, because the locals talk about all the pieces from olives to donkeys and the worth of raisins. The verisimilitude additionally acts as a barrier to melodrama. Once you solely have your self for firm, Pitharas suggests, excessive reactions could also be extra inside attain than you would possibly assume.