Toronto 2025 Review: HEN, The Chicken Comes First
A parable of corruption in Greece as told through the ingenuity and survival instincts of a chicken, it says something when the most normal film in a director’s filmography is an endurance thriller told entirely from the point of view of a hen.
Hungarian auteur and provocateur György Pálfi has been making extreme, grotesquely poetic, viscerally absurd, surreal cinematic entertainments for nearly two decades. His debut film Hukkle was a deceptive murder-mystery as witnessed by a old man with a hiccup condition.
His follow-up, and perhaps most notorious film, Taxidermia, arguably the strangest film ever made, follows several generations of an extremely Soviet, extremely weird Hungarian family, and features bestiality, a flaming penis ejaculation, graphic pig butchering, competitive eating, extreme obesity, a metric tonne of vomit, self mutilation as performative suicide, and (of course) cat-taxidermy. Along the way towards Hen, Pálfi also made a zero-budget dystopian science fiction where the primary currency is alcohol (Perpetuity), and the multi-story -- literally and figuratively -- tale of a woman who jumps from an apartment building, only to survive, and broken-bodied, climbs back up each floor, while experiencing the lives of her neighbours at each level of her ascent (Free Fall).
Opening with an extreme closeup of a pulsating cloaca, the orifice where the egg comes from, the film starts with the birth of our heroine, and proceeds from there as a non-stop Rube Goldberg thrill ride through the processing machinery of a factory farm. Through a series of fortunate events, she is stolen by one of the employee drivers, to be a future dinner for the presumably underpaid labourer.
Escaping from the truck, and out in the real world, the hen evades sly foxes, four-lane expressways (many of the age-old questions are answered here, if only tangentially and in jest), broom wielding gas station attendants, hungry birds of prey, and sex-crazed roosters (yes, that’s plural), a casually indifferent restaurant owner stealing her eggs, the chaotic household of a sex obsessed single-mom and her neglected offspring, and even a violent human smuggling operation. You might think a live-action movie filmed predominantly at foot-level about the harrowing adventures of a chicken -- who just wants to have a home and children of her own -- would drag on a bit, or become repetitive, but this 90-minute film feels like a breezy 30. In fact, Pálfi weaponizes repetition at several points as a form of rhythmic comedic interludes.
Each obstacle faced is a set-piece in its own right, brilliantly played by eight perfectly cast real-life Hungarian chickens (named Eszti, Szandi, Feri, Enci, Eti, Enikő, Nóra, and Anett), and often shot like a stunt spectacular, with the occasional pop music needle-drop to emphasise the mood of a scene. It is engaging and entertaining stuff with a genre-edge to it that sets it wide apart from the traditional family oriented live-action animal movies (The Incredible Journey, The Bear) or the more empathy-machine sadness of animal focused art-house movies (EO, Au Hasard Balthazar).
Even in this, his most straightforward endeavour, György Pálfi remains a surreal mixmaster of cinematic forms. His films are rarely this effortless to watch without wincing. Although it might be worth warning (*SPOILER ALERT / TRIGGER WARNING*) that at at one point, the hen is set on fire, at another the hen eats chicken -- technically making this a cannibal film -- and at yet a further point, the hen murders several climate-crisis migrants. Even as the closing credits reassure that each animal was treated ethically over the making of the film, I am not so sure. You have been warned.
In the end though, Hen is a salute to the survival instincts that we, regardless of species, are born with, and how we hone them along the way with each existential or physical struggle that does not end us, making us stronger. It bears a tenderness towards our need to reproduce and protect our kids. And a commentary on the futile attempts in keeping them at peace from the very trials that made us who and what we are. Also: Greece, try to get your shit together.
