Hungarian film director György Pálfi has long been a one-off talent: a surrealist-formalist of sorts who is equally comfortable making a romantic film comprised of hundreds of clips from other movies (Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen), a sick-puppy black comedy about a taxidermist who adores cats (Taxidermia), and a near-silent, portrait of sinister village life in which one character has permanent hiccups (Hukkle). By comparison, his latest, Hen is practically mainstream. That is really saying something given it’s a film whose main character is a black-brown hen (played by about eight poultry thespians and not CGI) who quizzically observes a world where humans treat each other like, well, animals. Comparisons have inevitably been made to a couple of recent features with animal protagonists, such as Andrea Arnold’s Cow and Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey-centric EO, but Hen is lighter and more amusing, if one can say that of a film that features an extended subplot about human trafficking with deadly consequences.
How Pálfi manages to pull this off is a cinematic mystery, but it probably has to do with his light tonal touch and his ability to truly empathise with his avian heroine without resorting to anthropomorphic sentimentalism. This hen acts much like a real chicken in that she combines shrewd survival instincts and utter gormlessness to a winning degree. For example, after surviving the Greek battery farm where she hatches (a wee black speck in a sea of yellow chicks), she manages to escape the clutches of a trucker who plans to make dinner out of her. Just when you think she has found safety, a fox (amazingly well trained, and also not CGI as far as I can tell) starts stalking her, chasing her into a busy road where the chicken literally crosses the road with the blithe idiocy that makes chickens so adorable. The fox isn’t so lucky. Incidentally, the film does have a disclaimer at the end averring that no animals were harmed during the making of the movie, which is a relief.
In fact, the cinematic universe where this story unfolds is just as ruthless to homo sapiens. The hen ends up living at a rundown disused restaurant with a view of the seaside, owned by an elderly man (Yannis Kokiasmenos) who takes a bit of a shine to her after she keeps managing to escape the mangy coop where he puts her. It’s no surprise she longs to get out: she is bullied by the other hens while the cockerel, a wretched-looking creature who, like the rest of the flock, has lost most of his neck feathers due to chicken-on-chicken violence, copulates violently with her every day. Behaviour-wise the humans are no better, especially the old man’s daughter’s boyfriend, who is in cahoots with gangsters trafficking refugees that they hide at the restaurant, packed in dark rooms with water if they’re lucky – just like the chickens we saw at the beginning. And while it all doesn’t end well for any of the people, there’s some tiny solace in seeing that at least life goes on for other creatures. The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.
• Hen is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 May.
