Today's Review: Troll Hunter

I certainly haven't seen a Norwegian movie, at least not in a long time. But this one has been quite hyped up over here with trailers and the like, so I was definitely looking forward to it.

Troll Hunter takes the form of a "found footage" movie, in the vein of The Blair Witch Project. It follows a group of students attempting to pursue an illegal bear poacher across Norway, but instead stumbling upon a man who is working in secrecy with a branch of the government, keeping the troll population of Norway under control. While the students don't quite believe him at first, they carry on following him and encounter these unbelievably huge beasts, and discover the tactics used by the hunter to keep them at bay.

Troll Hunter is certainly a very tongue in cheek take on the regular found footage genre. While zombies and ghosts are familiar territory for several jump scares and suspense, these massive trolls, and the explanations behind them are clearly quite silly. While doing a good job of making the characters believable, the movie clearly doesn't take itself too seriously, even inserting an excellent cameo of the Norwegian Prime Minister.

The scenes are structured is quite good, with interviews spliced between the action sequences in order to explain the backstory and further the plot, but while the final product is quite entertaining there are certainly some slow parts, and the dialogue can get a little silly at times, though this may be due to the translation from the original language. If you're going to watch it, I'd go for the subtitles option instead of the ridiculous dub that I decided to check out at a few points throughout.

Still, this is probably new territory for Norwegian cinema, and it's admirable to see them taking the tongue in cheek route rather than churning out another regular horror story. The CG used for the trolls is pretty awesome, and while I certainly didn't feel utterly engrossed all the way through, it was certainly entertaining enough to hold my attention. It's a great idea, and it's pretty well executed.

My rating: 4/5