Description

Trolls. They’re big. They’re dumb. They eat rocks. And as it turns out, they are not just a fairy tale creation. Thomas, Kalle and Johanna are a trio of student filmmakers striking out to the remote parts of Norway on assignment. Their task: Find and question the illegal poacher roaming the region, killing bears, a carefully regulated animal population, as he goes. With the help of local hunters they track the man down, a solitary soul named Hans who roams the countryside in his battered Land Rover and pungent trailer. But once they finally get Hans to talk, what they find out is not at all what they expect. Because while Hans is indeed a hunter — and one who works resolutely off the books — bears are not his quarry. No, the bears are a cover-up. His real targets are trolls. Genuine, authentic trolls. Enormous brutes that roam the forests and mountains of the far north of Norway, their existence carefully concealed by a secret government agency. When the trolls break out of their assigned areas, it is Hans’s task to hunt them down, neutralizing the threat using his specialized weaponry — a giant ultraviolet flashlight, basically, which produces simulated sunlight strong enough to turn the beasts to stone or cause them to explode, depending on the troll variety.

Shot in a documentary style, THE TROLL HUNTER is a wry, straight-faced creature comedy. While recognizing that the audience wants trolls — and delivering plenty of them — the heart of the piece is really the dry cynicism of Hans, balanced against the naive optimism of student leader Thomas. The offbeat relationship between this odd couple and their massive, mythical prey has made André Øvredal’s THE TROLL HUNTER a huge hit at Sundance, Tribeca and around the world, and Fantasia is proud to bring the beasts to Canada.

—Todd Brown