Chicken steals the show in people-smuggling drama

Daniel Nelson

I felt sure that A Useful Ghost  -a Thai love story about vacuum cleaners - was a shoo-in for the most unusual film of the year. Until I saw Hen.

It’s a drama about a Greek chicken who escapes her fate as a factory-farm beast and ends up in the midst of an equally deadly people-smuggling scam.

The action, and there’s plenty of it, is seen through the eyes of the plucky bird. No, it’s not animation (though there’s some production trickery). It’s a full-on crime caper with real actors.

The lead is played by a chicken. Or rather, by eight indistinguishable but different chickens.

Hungarian director György Pálfi explains that ”first they had to get used to the human presence, the proximity of humans. On the other hand, with the help of the animal trainers, we had to discover their innate abilities, i.e. which hens are good at what. Some of them were good at pecking, some were good at running, some were good at slow shuffling, jumping or sitting for long periods of time.”

They deliver excellent performances. There are some good human performances as well, but they never manage to steal the show.

The hen’s life, with its dangerous predators and love interest, runs parallel with the human story about a family that has swapped running a taverna for handling contraband. But at one catastrophic moment the parallel lives cross as a result of an accidental action by the hen.

The smuggled migrants in the film have no names, no known origin, no lives outside the vans into which they are bundled. That’s a harsh truth, like the countless chicks in the cages and conveyor belts in the film’s opening scenes.

Perhaps that’s the bleak moral. That’s certainly how it’s seen by the crime boss who arrives on the scene to avenge the business loss inadvertently created by the hen’s feet. He tosses a piece of cooked chicken at our hen heroine and notes satisfyingly to his minions that she’s eagerly devouring her own kind. It’s a dog eat dog film.