Metacritic reviews

Mikkelsen, who is not given to sympathetic roles, has never been better. This is cinema that sinks its claws into your back.

For anyone with even a halfway developed sense of justice The Hunt may prove stressful, frustrating, even enraging, but it’s also an unbelievably effective watch, that, if nothing else signals an undeniable return to form for Vinterberg, and yet another blistering performance from Mikkelsen. See it, if only for the debates it will cause afterward.

Propelled by Mads Mikkelsen’s shattering performance as the blameless man whose life threatens to be destroyed, the film is superbly acted by a cast that never strikes a false note or softens the impact with consolatory sentiment.

It’s a pretty conventional “Lifetime Original Movie” sort of story. But co-writer/director Thomas Vinterberg (“Dear Wendy”) makes it work by building a sense of frustrating unease into it all.

It is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance.

Vinterberg keeps us guessing right up to and after an end shot that suggests how tough some viral rumours are to shake off.

Beautifully performed and tough as nails, Vinterberg's social drama could not be any more timely.

What a knotty, frighteningly real drama The Hunt is.

The film is in part an exceedingly black comedy that parodies proper society's eager, self-righteous naïveté on the subject of its children.

Mikkelsen impresses here as a warm-hearted man who finds himself caught up in a situation way beyond his control.