Hanna (2011)

Joe Wright's Hanna arrives from 2011, a year when a teenage assassin raised on a frozen Finnish lake could carry a film without a mission statement stapled to it. Saoirse Ronan plays the title character with a stare that suggests she has already catalogued the worst the world intends. Eric Bana trains her. Cate Blanchett hunts her. The Chemical Brothers supply a score that thumps like a pulse under duress. It is a dark fairy tale and it knows it, borrowing the wolf and the wicked queen and dressing them in the language of spycraft.

The film's cultural ambitions are modest, and we should say so plainly. The cast is uniformly white and European, and race never enters the frame as a subject. The frozen wilderness is atmosphere, not an environmental plea. The villainy is institutional, a rogue intelligence program, which is to say the film holds no grudge against money. There is a single kiss between Hanna and Sophie, the daughter of a holidaying family, and it arrives with no fanfare, no thesis, no consequence. It is a moment, not a movement. That the protagonist and her chief antagonist are women is true, and the marketing leaned on the phrase strong woman, but the machinery here is pursuit and revenge. It argues nothing.

What remains is craft. The film shows instead of lecturing, and its moral universe is delivered through blood and snow and a magician hanging in an abandoned amusement park. We have sat through many pictures that explain themselves at length. This one declines. For that restraint, and for Ronan's unnerving composure, Hanna earns a measure of respect from a critic who has grown tired of being told what to think. It simply wants to be watched.