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KatieKatieKatie3.5

hen’s body count: 2😜😜…hen’s body count: 12😳

davidehrlich3.0

Among the bleakest films ever made, Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” (1977) famously ends not with the suicide of its title character, but with a haunting coda in which a chicken pecks at a miniature piano inside a surreal roadside tourist trap’s coin-operated display. It’s a visual metaphor for the inescapable banality of life on Earth, and for the dehumanizing work people are forced to do to disguise the many failures of the American Dream. It’s also the last thing that Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis saw before he killed himself. “Look into the eyes of a chicken,” Herzog has said, “and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiending stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creatures in the world.”That sentiment has long endured as modern cinema’s definitive stance on chickens (despite Aardman’s best efforts), but now, after witnessing the 50 years of entropy that followed “Stroszek,” Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi is crying fowl. Chickens are not the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creatures in the world, he contends. We are. How can you tell? Easy: Just look at us through the eyes of a chicken.A cute, cockeyed yarn that unspools like a feathered cross between “EO” and “Flow,” Pálfi’s “Hen” tells the story of a jet-black Leghorn chicken who escapes a Greek factory farm after she’s plucked from the rest of her flock because of the color of her plumage. A worker decides to take the bird home so that his wife can serve it for dinner, but our sly heroine — played by a brave hen named Feri, in addition to her seven indistinguishable stunt doubles — makes a daring escape when her captor stops his truck to refuel. But she’s snapped up again by the teeth of a dog named Titan, who carries the chicken back to the ramshackle seaside restaurant where his owner (Yannis Kokiasmenos) has much bigger problems than what to serve for dinner.If the precise contours of those problems are a bit difficult to deduce, that’s probably because — as we’ve already established — this movie is told through the eyes of a chicken. Sometimes literally, thanks to Pálfi’s judicious deployment of POV, which is useful for times when our ruffled protagonist is, say, trapped inside a cardboard box (there’s an excellent bit where the hen starts moving the cardboard box from the inside, a “Metal Gear Solid”-inspired visual gag that proves typical of the director’s wry humor). And what does a chicken know of Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis? Of a protest between angry citizens and riot police? Of human trafficking, and the complications thereof? To judge by the film’s regular assortment of amusingly blank reaction shots, I’d wager “very little.” The titular hen doesn’t even think to look both ways when she crosses the road after flying the coop, let alone have a good answer as to why she’s doing it.~this review continues on IndieWire~

jess mak3.5

WAS THERE A CHICKEN INTIMACY COORDINATOR???!!