Film Summary CCLXXVI (The Hunter)

Talk about having mislead representation of a film. I was expecting to watch a movie like 'The Fugitive' or 'Air Force One'. Instead I got this. A very subtle, quiet and occasionally intense atmospheric film. With some occasional drama mixed in for good measure.
John de Lancie is a mysterious man who works for some corporate Enterprise by the name of red leaf. They assigned him to Tasmania to hunt down the possably remaining Thylacine.The whole thing has a Biosyn* vibe to it.

We don't know why Willem Dafoe is going out to get this creature originally. It's implied that he's to kill the thing and bring back blood samples. So you know something's up, most people think it's for cloning. Recreate an extinct creature and sell it out of the world or put it in the zoo and make a bunch of money. But it's hinted at later on that the creatures blood might actually be used as a neurotoxin that cause shock in people (or possibly remove shock.) I don't really remember that part, that's not the point of the film. The Real point of the film is Willem Dafoe going around the Wilderness hunting down this mysterious creature, getting paranoid that he's being followed and eventually forming a relationship with the woman whose house he's renting.

And forming a relationship with a woman's kids. He becomes a kind of father surrogate for them. Their father was the guy who was out there hunting for the creature in the first place. But something happened to him and no one knows what it was. It seems like the entire town is against Willem Dafoe.

You have the Logging Company who can't work anymore because of environmentalism. You've got a weird hippie group who is also looking for the Tasmanian tiger for their own unique plan. And then you've got a mystery that unravels itself involving the Red Leaf company. The film only hints at certain aspects of a greater story. For you spend just about every moment with Willem Dafoe.

This is another one of those Sam Neill gets manipulated into being the bad guy. The poor guy just can't catch a break.
I personally love movies like this. Focusing on one individual character and showing his everyday life, and only trying to piece together what he knows. It's a fantastic character piece for Willem Dafoe. 

And of course it has Sam neon which makes it all the more better.

*Biosyn is a fictional antagonistic company in the Jurassic Park universe. There the guys that hired 'Dennis nedry' to steal all the dinosaur DNA from the Island. It was a huge event of corporate espionage.