Hen (15)
Directed by Palfi Gyorgy
★★★★☆

PALFI GYORGY seems to have defined a new genre – the gallinaceous picaresque. 

The Hungarian director’s eighth feature, shot in Greece, begins as a darkly humorous road movie with a twist: the lead character is a maltreated but resilient rogue; she is also a hen. When a crime thriller strand is introduced, the narrative becomes knottier and more acutely unsettling. 

There is arresting imagery throughout the film, but the opening is spectacular. A close-up shot of an egg emerging from a hen’s cloacal cavity is followed by a crisply edited montage highlighting the perfunctory brutalities of a poultry factory. Chicks are scooped and flung by workers, then dropped into containers from the rollers, chutes and funnels of machines. 

This sequence gains an additional layer of significance when the focus shifts from the damaging effect of the profit motive on birds to its deleterious impact on vulnerable people. 

A bizarre sequence of events enables the titular hen to escape the egg-to-plate process. Her encounters with a series of potential predators are genuinely harrowing, particularly the ground-level shots of her pursuit by a fox.  

The story unfolds independently of the hen’s point of view, but she is present in every scene – in effect becoming a witness to political protest, crime, betrayal, violence and the occasional moment of joy. Gyorgy’s focus on the hen allows the human stories to emerge gradually, as a series of fragmented encounters. 

The pivotal moment of the narrative is her arrival at a run-down seafood taverna in the jaws of a dog. Initially unfeeling, the owner (a performance of controlled intensity by Ioannis Kokiasmenos) develops an affinity with the hen after she survives a near-fatal calamity. It’s an island of kindness in a sea of corruption and cruelty. 

The owner – who longs to restore his taverna – has a volatile relationship with his daughter and her partner. Mired in organised crime, he drifts from storing smuggled goods to involvement in people trafficking. The consequences are chaotic and tragic.

Gyorgy’s plea for the powerless is subtle and exhilarating. Didacticism and emotional manipulation are rejected in favour of cleverly structured image-based storytelling. 

In cinemas Friday May 22