The Hunter (2011)

A mercenary arrives in the Tasmanian wilderness with a rifle, a fake academic credential, and a contract from a biotech firm called Red Leaf, which would like the last thylacine located, sampled, and then erased from the record so no competitor can claim its DNA. Daniel Nettheim's film proceeds at the pace of a man checking empty traps. Willem Dafoe spends long stretches alone in the scrub, saying nothing, and the film is content to let him. This is a quiet piece of work, and its quietness is largely the point.

The politics here are of a gentler vintage. Loggers need jobs, environmentalists have strung up roadblocks, and the two sides glower at each other across a pub table while a corporation quietly manipulates both. Red Leaf is a villain of the profit motive, which earns the film a modest place in the eat-the-rich ledger, though the screenplay never stops to deliver a speech about it. The thylacine itself functions as a conservation emblem, and the deforestation subplot registers as environmental concern of the older, tree-hugging variety. Nobody mentions carbon. The sermonizing is kept to a minimum, which is to the film's credit and to its commercial detriment.

What the film does not do is notable. The cast is uniformly white. Lucy Armstrong spends much of the running time medicated into a stupor, and the male lead confiscates her pills and bathes her while she is unconscious, a sequence the film presents as tender caretaking without a flicker of unease. Her son Jamie barely speaks, and no framework is offered for this beyond shyness. There is no racial commentary, no LGBTQ subtext, no body-positive gesture, no revisionist history. Just a man, a gun, a dead tiger, and the slow recognition that the corporation will win regardless. The camera lingers on the wilderness. The wilderness does not care.