![]() Maybe it is her very name, associated as it is with the Biblical first woman. Maybe it is the distinctive red hoodie that she wears, aligning her woodland adventures to those of a famous fairytale heroine. The protagonist Eve (Lucie Debay) may belong to contemporary times, she may work in construction – claiming and taming for civilisation the lands on the edge of the forest – but she is, like the heroine of the huntress’ story, beleaguered by men: her bullying boss her controlling boyfriend an unwelcome suitor in a bar and finally a psychopathic rapist-murderer (Arieh Worthalter, seductive and sadistic in equal measure) and his accomplice (Ciaran O’Brien) who, to different degrees, want her to star in their latest snuff video.Īs the terrified Eve flees these two men in the woods, she enters a wilderness of mythic archetypes. For while this third feature from Vincent Paronnaud – who co-directed Persepolis(2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011) with Marjane Satrapi, and went solo (under the name Winshluss) on Villemolle 81 (2009) – is set in our own times rather than the ancient age of the Huntress’ tale, it still expressly unfolds in the self-same woods, and Paronnaud makes it clear that he starts very much as he intends to finish, with a potent allegory of misogynistic, murderous patriarchy and wild feminine nature, of impotent predation and reversed victimhood. At its end, the mother tells her son that while the wolves have long since left the forest, the men remain – and to underline her point, there is, just before the film’s title appears, a violent jump cut to home video footage of a heavy-breathing man in a balaclava staring menacingly into the camera. This story’s status as a fairytale is confirmed by its visualisation through highly stylised animation which contrasts with the real sylvan setting in which the huntress tells her story. A mother, credited as ‘the huntress’ (Simone Milsoochter), tells her eight-year-old son Jeremy (Vladimir Ryelandt) of a time long ago when, in this very wood, giant wolves saved an innocent girl from being sacrificed and eaten by the priest Nicodemus and his starving army of peasant crusaders.
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