3. Lucas - The Hunt
Lucas is just an ordinary nice guy - charming and honest, he's the type of Kindergarten teacher anyone would be happy for their kids to have. This is rendered in a sharp sense of dark irony when Mads Mikkelsen's character is accused of sexually assaulting a child and his life spirals out of control. Lucas can do nothing but try in vain to hold onto his dignity as his reputation gets consistently worse. Lucas is admirable for his strength of character, for even as the accusations are gaining more and more traction, he refuses to validate them by denying that he ever molested a child. The claim is ridiculous and they should know that, right? It's this integrity that makes his story outright tragic to watch as he is rendered an outcast in his own community. Playing the character in two different languages - Danish for most of the film, occasionally English for his girlfriend - Mads Mikkelsen navigates this character's emotional struggle primarily in subtext - one of the inspired elements about Thomas Vinterberg's screenplay is how huge turning points are never telegraphed through exposition. It is clear through his relationship with his son, his ex-wife, and his dog how much the accusations hurt him, but he never tells this to anyone outright.
Robert James
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Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
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