‘Hunt’: Thessaloniki Review

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

Watching the first few minutes of Hunt, a thriller seems to be afoot. Yannis (non-professional Giannis Belis) heads out in his car at night. As dawn comes, he is making his way through an autumnal woodland, shotgun at the ready, hunting thrushes. A combination of amplified sound design, including his laboured breathing, handheld in- and out-of-focus camerawork from Thanos Liberopoulos and skittish cutting, lends the sequence an impressionistic tension. It is almost as though he is being surveilled.

Pitharas’ overall picture of Greece is as far away from a sun-kissed beach postcard as you can get

Even though Christos Pitharas’ second fiction feature quickly morphs into a melancholy character study of a man being pushed to the limit, the intensity of those opening moments is impressively maintained throughout. Making its world premiere in the Meet The Neighbours competition at Thessaloniki Film Festival, Hunt’s plot beats may be familiar but Pitharas executes them economically with plenty of style and rhythm, which should appeal to other festivals and, potentially, streamers along the line.

The director’s 2018 nonfiction mid-length film Sopi – A Day In previously screened in Thessaloniki’s sister documentary festival and he returns to the southern Greek village of Sopi for part of this drama. The permanently smoking, unshaven Yannis, who already has a crumpled air, makes a series of visits there after the death of his estranged mother.

His guilt over their estrangement offers a simmering undercurrent as he also faces pressures elsewhere. At the workshop where he’s employed, Yannis and his boss Makis (Meletis Georgiadis) are trying to meet an impending order while, back at his flat, he is being increasingly set on edge by the constant barking and whining of the dog that belongs to his unpleasant neighbour Elias (Vasilis Anastasiou).

The dog, Mal, is a pitbull type but, much to Elias’ disdain, a sweetie. The mutt spends its days and nights stuck on the neighbouring balcony when not suffering abuse at the hands of his owner – thankfully, for animal lovers, heard rather than seen. Attempts by Yannis to help the dog, meanwhile, are met with threats from Elias.

Pitharas keeps us with Yannis, using visuals as much as dialogue to suggest his loneliness, which is magnified by the use of the boxy and claustrophobic academy ratio. The director also makes judicious use of impressionistic dream sequences to heighten the sense of the character’s inner turmoil. The shift in tone is enhanced by the guitar-driven scoring from Dinos Tselis and Anna Komianou, which uses percussion to deliver tension when called for. Pitharas’ overall picture of Greece is as far away from a sun-kissed beach postcard as you can get, brooding with thunder and the threat of an emotional storm.

The spare nature of Yannis’ life makes the details stand out. When you have nobody to come home to, feeding a slice of meat to a dog carries a promise of longed-for connection, while a piece of ungifted but carefully crafted jewellery in a coat pocket carries with it the weight of unfulfilled hope.

The film’s trim length may make for a distilled story but it doesn’t leave much room for development of the subsidiary characters, who are mainly called upon to emphasise the contours of Yannis’ existence. The director also struggles to fully integrate a subplot regarding Yannis’ inheritance into the wider scheme of things.

But if there is a certain predictability to the plot it feels borne out of reality rather than cliche. That sense of the real world is anchored by Belis, who like his character is a blacksmith by trade. Village conversations also have a documentary tenor, as the locals discuss everything from olives to donkeys and the price of raisins. The verisimilitude also acts as a barrier to melodrama. When you only have yourself for company, Pitharas suggests, extreme reactions may be more within reach than you might think.