Larpers (more properly L.A.R.P.ers, i.e. Live-Action Role Players, i.e. folks that dress up like goblins and wizards and engage in foam-sword combat in the woods) have been one side of a cinematic love affair, of late. Documentaries like Darkon and Monster Camp try and peel back the fake fur and face paint to see the real people beneath, while comedies like Role Models see in the admittedly nerdy hobby a wellspring of both laughs and weirdly noble self-realization.
In director Alexandre Franchi's debut film The Wild Hunt, larping is something altogether more serious, and much more sinister. Erik Magnusson (Ricky Mabe), a Canadian born to an Icelandic father whom he now reluctantly cares for, is bothered by repeated dreams of a banging door and the sound of his girlfriend Evelyn (Tiio Horn) crying out in fear. Evelyn has left him for the weekend, to role play a princess in Erik's older brother Bjorn's larp-group, a viking and troll setting Bjorn (Mark A. Krupa) has all but disappeared into. To win her back, Erik must navigate the confusing, threatening larp world, where he discovers that some of the players aren't just escaping workaday responsibilities but are instead building a framework to work out some of their darker, more violent fantasies.
It's an enjoyable film, troubled by a difficult script. On the one hand it's enjoyably novel: setting a murder-and-revenge story amongst the assumedly meek, awkward foam-sword and teva-sandals crowd is an entertaining twist, and Franchi, helped enormously by good Gothic set dec and often beautiful cinematography by Claudine Sauvé is able to wring surprisingly high drama out of the whole thing. On the other hand, in building up to the grand guignol finale the film strains and struggles, testing credulity both in terms of character motivation and in terms of basic emotional mathematics: it's hard at points to understand why Erik doesn't just dismiss the whole mess and go home. That said, there's rather more of the former dark beauty than the latter character weirdness, and the film (especially as a Canadian film artifact) is massively enjoyable on its merits, of which there are plenty. Missteps along a very original path are easily excused. 8/10
