In 2002, Hungarian director Pálfi György released his first film Hukkle to near-universal acclaim. The title, which is an onomatopoeia for the sound of a hiccup, was a 78-minute kaleidoscope, not so much a narrative film as a collection of highly unusual vignettes regarding the surrealism lurking just below the surface of rural village life. One of the most assured debut features of the decade, Hukkle announced Pálfi as a major new director. Alas, Pálfi fumbled the bag with his sophomore effort, 2006’s Taxidermia. A triptych of deeply unpleasant stories about three generations of revolting men, the film felt like nothing so much as a combination of Terry Gilliam’s cartoonish grotesquerie and Ulrich Seidl’s smug misanthropy. Pálfi has released six features in the intervening years, all to relative indifference. Meanwhile, the festival world turned its attention to Pálfi’s countryman Kórnel Mundruczó, despite his films being even more ridiculous than Taxidermia. Programmers can be a fickle bunch.
But Pálfi is back with a very unusual new film entitled Hen. Returning to some extent to the interest in the natural world that was so winning in Hukkle, Hen can be slotted very neatly into the current moment in global cinema. Borrowing from both the post-Balthasarianisms of Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO and the restrained barnyard anthropomorphism of Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda, Hen is the life story of a very soulful chicken. (The unnamed protagonist is portrayed by a total of eight stand-hens.) The film opens in an egg processing factory in Greece, where we observe the Big Agra circle of life. Some eggs are packaged to be sold as food, while others are permitted to hatch. Those baby chicks are then sent through a series of conveyor belts and sorting machines until they arrive at their very crowded, non-free-range accommodations. But wait! There’s one baby chick who stands apart from the rest, its scraggly black features a stark contrast to the sea of fuzzy yellow. This will be our titular hen, and her adventures have just begun.
It’s worth noting here that, although Pálfi does insist that no animals were harmed in the making of Hen and the moments that depict the deaths of fauna wild and domesticated are clearly achieved with judicious editing, this is nevertheless a film that probably could not be made in North America, even though the indignities that befall these hundreds of baby birds are simply documentary footage of stuff that happens every day, all over the world. There are certain moments where one suspects that Pálfi may have used AI, especially a scene of conflagration in which the hen nearly gets completely Kentucky-fried. But all indications are that Hen does its dirty work with montage, misdirection, and practical effects.
Quite by chance, the hen ends up living with the owner of a seaside restaurant (Yannis Kokiasmenos), his daughter (Maria Diakopanagiotou), and her criminal boyfriend (Argyris Pandazaras), a customs agent who is involved in a human smuggling operation. As was the case in Bresson’s Balthasar, the hen is an uncomprehending witness to the cruelty of venal bipeds, but whereas the donkey was characterized by his impassive, forlorn stare, Pálfi gets some truly quizzical and often very droll reaction shots from his fowl players. At its core, Hen is a testament to the enduring power of the Kuleshov effect. See someone get shot, then cut to a goggle-eyed chicken, and our cognition does the rest. Then again, a lot of the time Pálfi just hangs back and lets his poultry do what comes naturally — there are no fewer than four separate scenes of chicken sex in Hen. But let’s not shame a lady for enjoying a good cock.
Despite engaging with serious themes, Hen is firmly a dark comedy. The film uses the animal perspective to depict humankind as animalistic in its own way, but it’s not above a bit of emotional goosing. Pálfi has insinuated himself into the Greek Weird Wave, and it’s a good look on him. It would not be at all surprising if Hen proved to be a minor hit, and it will certainly put Pálfi back in the global cinema conversation. But it’s above all a heroine’s journey, at certain moments a live-action Chicken Run with a few elements of Toy Story thrown in the pot. This chicken does indeed cross the road, and as luck would have it, her predator never gets to the other side. In fact, Hen is a picaresque of unlikely triumph, one that unlike Balthasar, EO, or Gunda, ends with the mother hen outlasting her caretakers and tormentors alike. She gets a new beginning, and by embracing an unexpected optimism, Pálfi once again gives us something to crow about.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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