Willem Dafoe in THE HUNTER, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

“It must be nice not to need anybody.” This is what a biotech executive tells mercenary Martin David (Willem Dafoe) early in The Hunter. A company has hired Martin to track down what may be the last surviving example of the striped wolf known as the Tasmanian Tiger, a creature thought extinct in 1936. The animal’s venom contains a toxin that paralyzes its victims. What multinational would not want to get their hands on such promising and deadly genetic code?

Martin shoots wallabies to remove their hearts and use them for bait, discarding the rest of the animal. Such is the life of a loner. But when he lodges with a young mother (Frances O’Connor) and her two children, his loner status is jeopardized. The children’s father disappeared the previous year while searching for the Tasmanian tiger with more noble motives and a feeling that somebody was following him. But whom?

The Hunter has the familiar arc of a tale of espionage. Rival spies and gangs appear, and, like a spy, it is to this hunter’s professional advantage not to form attachments. But of course he does, and it’s not exactly a spoiler to say this leads to an epilogue right out of the Lifetime Channel. But if the film is about a hunter, it is also about a loner and his progress. As he tracks and gets closer to his wild prey, he also gets closer to being human.

Frances O’Connor in THE HUNTER, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Dafoe, with his character-actor looks and piercing blue eyes, gives a quality to Martin that a conventionally attractive actor could not. He doesn’t look like he belongs, and this conveys the isolation and outsiderness that Martin feels in a rural Tasmania where his work runs afoul of both the environmental activists who take him in and the loggers desperate to keep their jobs.

The Hunter charts no new territory, but Dafoe, the Tasmanian wilderness, and the elusive tiger keep your interest. Australian director Daniel Nettheim has spent the last decade of his career in television, and hasn’t helmed a feature since 2000’s Angst, but he deftly handles this tale of environmental intrigue. The Hunter brings Dafoe back to the forest that he so inauspiciously visited in Antichrist, and it is to the film’s credit that however the previous film may resonate, one doesn’t get the urge to yell out “Chaos reigns” in a crowded press screening. More lubricated audiences may not be able to resist.

The Hunter
Directed by Daniel Nettheim
Written by Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri, based on the novel by Julia Leigh.
Starring Willem Dafoe, Frances O’Connor, Sam Neill.
Rated R for language and brief violence (and will be pretty upsetting to animal lovers)
Running time 101 minutes
Opens today at Bethesda Row