This film is a piece of original fiction centred around a high-fantasy live-action roleplaying game (LARP). It was filmed at a LARP amusement park called Duché de Bicolline, which is in Quebec although the film is in English. The main actors are professional actors, playing characters that are in turn playing LARP characters*. The extras are real-life LARP players playing their LARP characters on screen.
The first half the film is a fun fish-out-of-water tale about Erik accepting that he has to play along with the LARP to get back the girl. The girl, Evelyn, is a flakey disposable woman with no features worth fighting for besides her “wonderful ass”. It’s tolerable because she’s used as a living MacGuffin to explore Duché de Bicolline and the emotional relationship between the viking brothers. This half is why the film won an audience award at Slamdance.
The second half of the film is all about perpetuating the myth that role-playing makes people go psychotic. I can only assume the Duché de Bicolline players had no idea this was in the script when they supported the filming of The Wild Hunt. Although this segment is well done (eg: it doesn’t glamorize violence), it’s exploitative and cheap. The script had enough subtlety that the brothers’ relationship provided a compelling conflict.
Kyla theorizes that the film makers were worried that regular audiences wouldn’t get into the high fantasy camp. I think that having Erik as the audience surrogate alleviates the need for such a dumbing-down. I’d love to see a documentary about Duché de Bicolline that trades the high production value of The Wild Hunt for a more engaging portrait.
* Notably, Mark Antony Krupa’s character Bjorn is in-LARP-character the entire film. Does that mean that Mark never played Bjorn-the-21st-century-guy? Discuss.
Tags: Movies, Reviews, victoria film festival
Was there an explicit reference to or did the plot parallel the actual myth of the Wild Hunt?
I’m disappointed in myself because I’d never heard of a “LARP amusement park” before.
I would say it actually had nothing to do with the wild hunt myth. The female lead is a life-death-rebirth goddess with a bit of year-king foreshadowing. I’m not really up on my mythology enough to see the rest of the archetypes, but I have the sense it mixed a fair number of them in.
Sounds like the Dark Carnival.
There was a fairly accurate Wild Hunt in the movie, similar to the one practiced by the Harii, as it involves killing enemies, not recruiting more people to join the hunt. It also has some similarities to the one described by H. A. Guerber as the Huntsman ends up being closer to prey than leader.