LARPing. That is today's acronym-derived verb. And what is "to LARP"? It stands for Live Action Role Playing and involves people gathering together at weekends and dressing up as vikings, elves or vampires and acting out a loosely defined ever-shifting scenario with dungeons and dragons style rules to govern its development. Er. To be fair it sounds shockingly uncool even for a t'internet movie geek like myself but, really, is it any worse than dressing up in military khakis and running around with a paintball gun, or dressing up as a sexy nun at halloween, or going to a murder mystery party,...alright it is worse. If you have ever stood downwind of a Games Workshop or accidentally wandered horrorstruck into a comics convention you may have a rather uncharitable preconcieved notion of the kind of human who would be drawn to LARPing but...well at least they arent f**king furries.
It's a strange little world, and incomprehensible to those outside it, and The Wild Hunt doesnt really make any narrative concessions to outsiders. It's a simple, lowly of budget tale about a massive LARPy event in the canadian woods and a number of hairy men fighting over an undeniably beautiful but also backhand-provokingly irritable girl.
The roleplayers are a motley crue divided into knights (arthurian yeomen, probably IT workers in real life) elves (tolkienesque pointy eared lesbians) Vikings (bearded shoutymen, resemble unemployed fishermen) and the Celts (facepainted barbarians, look like sinister grindcore fans) Glib descriptions aside, there's a good mix of character types in here, they arent all malodorous endomorphs and the director is clearly aware of the inherent ridiculousness of the LARP concept still while managing to treat the characters seriously. The majority of the movie is mildly amusing and trundles along agreeably at a sedate pace until a rather shocking and unexpected downbeat climax that changes the film's entire tone.
By the hammer of Odin! It's well shot, solidly acted and if it seems a little overlong even at a mere eighty-odd minutes, the last 15 or so elevate The Wild Hunt from a "meh" to a "Hmm...not bad".
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