REVIEW: Modest Trollhunter Offers Its Share of Knobby, Gnarled Delights

There are precious few mysteries left in a world scoured by satellites, street-cams, and all other manner of ravening photographer's eye. It's tough to believe in monsters, magic, lost islands, or even private lives in an era of wall-to-wall coverage, where every surveilled surface is space lost to possibility. It's Google's Earth, we're just zooming in on it. But instead of finally nailing down Big Foot or tracking the elusive unicorn, what's most often mined from the previously uncharted corners of our newly comprehensive, woefully literal view of the planet -- as this week's harvest of reputation-charring images, courtesy of Anthony Weiner, reminds us -- are banal reflections of our own persistent vanity, loneliness, and malignance.

Debates surrounding the photo-driven scandal of the day have a disingenuously ethological bent: Monster or all too human? Aberration or second nature? As if we all don't know this story and its unsatisfying narrative limits. And yet delimiting what little room is left to dream about each other is part of the project of klieg-lighting the corners of the world. Jumping online to make love (or lust) objects out of distant strangers could be seen, among other things, as a response to that tendency. On the other hand, as Stephen Colbert joked in his interview with Cave of Forgotten Dreams director Werner Herzog, even the bodies painted in one of the few truly wondrous, mysterious places to be discovered in recent memory could be reduced to mere examples of "cave porn," or cited as proof of humanity's innate impulse to represent and display our bodies in their bluntest outlines. In other words: I went back 32,000 years in human history and all I got was this ancient set of cave boobs. It's enough to send a girl hunting fairy-tale beasts in the fjords of Norway with an ultraviolet raygun.

And in fact the resurgence in fantasy storytelling that takes place here and now on Earth, from vampires to werewolves to the snouty, stinky trolls in Trollhunter, could be read as a reaction to the stifling proximity of what's known and knowable of the world at any and every given moment. All storytelling is of and about the human, but the earth-bound, contemporary fantasy has a specific appeal, providing distance and a certain relief from ourselves as it rewrites the known world in more mysterious terms.

In Trollhunter, a faux-assemblage of footage shot by three Nordic film students pursuing an enigmatic grump named Hans (Otto Jespersen) -- who was himself pursuing giant trolls -- the world is made delightfully strange again. It's a neat and too-rare trick, and director André Øvredal pulls it off by combining the now familiar "found footage" conceit with effects that range from computer-assisted realism (some of the night-vision shots of the marauding giants are the scariest) to the retro (one face-off appears to have been staged via King Kong-style stop-motion animation). It's a genre hybrid that makes something new from discarded cultural parts and a truly goofy premise.

The setup takes pains to assert the film's authenticity. Almost three hundred hours of found footage have been edited chronologically, we are told, and "no images have been manipulated." From that sober contradiction we move into the pro bono reporting adventures of Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Johanna (Johanna Mørck) and Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen), the little-seen cameraman. Originally following a story about a dastardly bear poacher, the trio are soon on the trail of a surly mountain man who spends his nights in the woods and sleeps by day in the pungent stench of his troll-proofed trailer. The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it. Thomas does, however, though the spectacular kill that ends the gang's first encounter with the tree-stompers clears up any doubt. Hans, a dissatisfied employee on a secret government payroll, agrees to be filmed at work, so that the world might finally know about the overgrown ids tromping across the Nordic countryside.

We are educated in the way of the troll (they can smell human odors but are also tipped off by Christian blood; they're hella dumb), their evocative taxonomy (you've got your Tosserhead, your Ringlefinch, your Jotnar), and the best way to kill them (with bright light, which either turns them to stone or makes them explode). Oh, and they don't show up in satellite photos -- suck it, Google! We learn -- lightly and too late in the game for it to mean much -- that despite their name and reputation, trolls are not necessarily anarchic by nature, and were converted to malice by the great troll holocaust of the 1970s (humans annexed their territory) and a modern rabies epidemic. The crew follows Hans on several outings, and though the pace slackens too much for the final hunt to redeem its prelude (at almost 105 minutes, Trollhunter could have used a more ruthless editor), the film's peculiar tonal mix of high adventure, a splotch of horror, and Scandinavian desolation proves well-suited to the lonely, cranky pursuit of lonelier, crankier monsters.

Øvredal's chosen format has its perks, from the no-nonsense jump cuts to the wide-eyed subjectivity shared between Kalle's camera and his cohorts. The night-vision tricks, used sparingly, are effective if not particularly original, one of several solutions to depicting the lo-fi hunt of a creature that only comes out at night. We watch the film knowing that none of the people it depicts are around to claim it, and are told it has come to light under the pretense of the public good, and information's wanting to be free. But trolls want to be free, too, in the land where cameras might poke in but will never prevail.