Hen: György Pálfi’s witty chicken odyssey blends animal adventure and politics

György Pálfi’s debut feature Hukkle (2002) was a top-to-bottom study of life in a village in the director’s native Hungary, the conceptual gimmick being that no particular distinction was drawn between its human inhabitants and everything else: they all ultimately perform variations on the age-old theme of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. But although Hen similarly sidelines its human characters (while they have more to say than they did in Hukkle, the first subtitle doesn’t appear until well past the seven-minute mark), the major difference here is that it has an upfront protagonist: a black Leghorn chicken.

Played primarily by three hens named Feri, Anett and Nóra, with backup from Eti, Szandi, Enci, Eszter and Enikő (each of which possessed a particular individual skill, such as running, jumping or playing dead), Hen’s poultry protagonist spends close to the entire running time escaping potentially perilous situations and being recaptured – rinse and repeat. En route to the village where she ends up, she encounters foxes, dogs, worms, mice and a hawk, from all of whom she learns important life lessons which help her to survive later on at the hands of humans and lustful roosters, with Giorgos Karvelas’s typically floor-level camera consistently emphasising her alarming fragility.

So far, so Disney True-Life Adventure (indeed, Pálfi stressed that none of the animals was CGI-enhanced), but the director of such satirical grotesqueries as Taxidermia (2006) and Free Fall (2014) hasn’t gone soft in his middle age. On the contrary, as the film progresses, Pálfi and long-term co-writer (and wife) Zsófia Ruttkay ramp up its abiding seriousness of purpose by drawing direct parallels between the way that massed groups of living creatures, whether they are newly hatched chicks or newly arrived refugees, are processed en bloc within systems designed for such a purpose. That said, the clinically antiseptic environment in which the chicks spend their first few days in the opening scenes is sharply contrasted with the dangers faced by the refugees later on. The chicks, after all, are being reared to become productive members of society (albeit without their explicit consent), whereas the people-traffickers are operating entirely outside it, with all the considerable physical risks that that implies to both themselves and especially their cargo.

Comparisons have inevitably been drawn with Viktor Kossakovsky’s pig study Gunda (2020), Andrea Arnold’s Cow (2021) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey saga EO (2022), but Hen has at least as much in common with Gints Zilbalodis’s animated Flow (2024), in that the entire film takes place either through the eyes or within earshot of a chicken who cannot interpret what she sees via anything other than her immediate frame of reference. In other words, she’s not so much a Greek chorus as a Greek witness (the film is entirely set in Greece, allegedly because Pálfi was refused official permission from Hungarian film bodies to make a film potentially critical of farming methods there). She is duly unmoved by the ghastly fate of one group of refugees, has no interest in the other human dramas playing out around her, but is visibly anxious about the fate of her various eggs. From her perspective, a shot of a sizzling omelette is a real heart-clutcher, whereas the casual murder of one of the film’s main human characters is just one of those things.

As with Pálfi’s earlier films, Hen is delightfully witty one moment (with plenty of chuckles provided by a lively musical accompaniment that includes snatches of Khachaturian’s Spartacus, Ravel’s Boléro and the Greek love song ‘Episimi Agapimeni’, or a brief vignette in which the chicken watches one of her ancestors in the form of a dinosaur rampaging across a television screen), and positively alarming the next. Quite a few people will doubtless make a point of sitting through the end credits for the reassuring disclaimer that no animals were harmed during production, so unlikely does this seem at the film’s more alarming moments (one fiery last-minute escape in particular).

Chickens are not sentimental creatures – as the film repeatedly makes clear, they don’t have time to be – and so neither is the film; if a bird gets run over, Pálfi will cut to a close-up of the freshly roasted carcass on the dinner table. But after repeatedly putting us through the emotional wringer, he does at least reward us with an upbeat ending of sorts, even if it’s more of a cosy snapshot than a fully fledged happy-ever-after arrangement.

► Hen is in UK cinemas 22 May.