The Head Hunter (2018)

A man (Christopher Rygh) lives a lonely life in a hut in the wilderness of a technologically medieval fantasy world. Following sparse flashbacks, he wasn’t always alone but once had a daughter (Cora Kaufman); a woman never comes into play. The daughter was killed by some kind of monster, and the man now earns a pay he derisively throws to the side as the local king’s monster hunter, rather unhygienic ramming a fresh and unprepared monster head onto a spike in what amounts to his living room whenever he’s back from a job. He is really biding his time with this, waiting for the return of the monster that killed his daughter. Eventually, it does indeed return.

Jordan Downey’s The Head Hunter is a pretty great little movie, the sort of film that wants to tell a very specific tale in a very specific way and then goes about telling it just so. In this case this means the camera and the audience are not accompanying the man on his monster hunts at all, only witnessing his preparation, perhaps a bit of the way towards the monster, his usually wounded returns, his healing his wounds with a magic goo, his ritual of putting the monster heads on spikes and his visits to his daughter’s grave where the dead child is the only one witnessing the handful of sentences he ever speaks.

It’s a very sparse approach to this sort of tale that probably will leave more than a few viewers hoping for some hot monster fighting action disappointed, but which really says all it needs to say about him and his life, the way everything he does is only part of waiting for and surviving until the only thing happens that still has meaning for him: the return of the thing that killed his daughter. So the film shaves all of these things unimportant to its protagonist off, too, carefully focusing on what’s important: small gestures, the man’s ever heavier and strained breathing, the little failures and chance mishaps that can add up to disaster rather quickly, the tiny circle grief and the need for vengeance has reduced the man’s life to. We do get to see the fight against the thing that killed his daughter, though, or rather, the excellently staged and paced final stretch of it that really proves the film hasn’t just not shown the monsters before because it couldn’t come up with proper monster costumes.

It’s all grim and lovely at the same time, and works as a rather more personal sword and sorcery/horror movie than typical of the genre, as well as it does as one where everything that happens is a living (if you can call the man’s existence living still), breathing metaphor. Even the ending that might seem a bit too left-field at first works exceedingly well with the central metaphor about the destructive force of grief.

The film also looks fantastic, particularly for something that couldn’t have had much of a budget, with some great, oppressive landscape shots and a staging that always focuses on the small things that will turn out to mean so much, as well as highly expressive lighting and sound design that’s sparse in just the right way to fit the film.


I really love Downey’s approach to the fantasy genre here, taking well-worn (and much-loved by me, don’t get me wrong) elements, making minor adjustments to them that are mostly based on literally changing our perspective on them, and turning them into a film that’s one of a kind, as far as I know. There are so many clever little touches in the film too - from the derisive yet compulsive way Rygh stakes the heads to his wall to Downey’s version of Chekhov's Gun – so that it feels like a true labour of love rather than another film of someone adapting their D&D campaign (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course).