Troll Hunter (2010)

Trollhunter arrives from Norway in 2010 with a flash-gun, a Land Rover, and a profound disinterest in instructing anyone about anything. André Øvredal's found-footage mockumentary follows three Volda students as they tail Hans, a weary civil servant who kills trolls for a living and plants bear carcasses so the public stays calm. The Troll Security Service hovers in the background, confiscating tapes and filing paperwork. It is a creature feature with a bureaucratic pulse, and it treats its own mythology as a personnel problem.

Hans complains about his salary. That is the extent of the economic critique, and it lands as the grumbling of a man with a dangerous job and a modest pension, not a summons to redistribute anything. The power lines strung across the fjords function as an electric fence for trolls, and the wildlife regulations exist to keep farmers quiet. Nobody here stops to explain what any of it means for the planet. The women in the crew, Johanna and later Malica, handle their cameras with competence and receive no ceremony for it. The Polish bear hunter is a joke about Norwegian immigration attitudes, delivered with a straight face by Robert Stoltenberg, and the film lets the audience squirm without issuing a verdict. Folklore gets adapted. History does not. No one is redeemed, no one is educated, and the Prime Minister's cameo is a visual gag, not a confession.

What we have, then, is a film that satirizes secrecy and pays its respects to Peer Gynt. The trolls turn to stone in UV light because the old stories said so. The closing credits insist no trolls were harmed. Somewhere a studio executive once wanted to remake this, and the remake died, which feels correct. The film's cultural temperature is low, its humor dry, its agenda nonexistent. It is a documentary about a man with a very strange job, and it would prefer to remain one.