Eight Hens, One Hero: György Pálfi's Chicken Survival Epic Works

György Pálfi's "Hen" uses eight live chickens to play a single nameless hero, and not one frame of CGI. The film premiered in Toronto's Platform competition last year, where it earned an honorable mention from the jury, and it now stands as the Hungarian auteur's most narratively conventional — and perhaps most affecting — work to date.

Why does a chicken cross a road in "Hen"? Because a fox is on her tail. The stakes in Pálfi's creature feature are literal: real predators chase real prey, and your heart pounds for a bird that is, as our review source puts it, "poor, dumb but surprisingly resourceful." Made with a predominantly non-human ensemble, the film is described as "a sustained cinematic feat of fauna-wrangling unlike any other."

Who is Pálfi, and why does this film surprise?

Coming from most filmmakers, "Hen" would count as an eccentric project. From Pálfi, whose experimental oeuvre includes 2006's Cannes-selected body horror "Taxidermia" and 2018's mixed-media Stanislaw Lem adaptation "His Master's Voice," it amounts to "a grandly linear hero's journey" — one where the hero happens to be a scarlet-combed chicken. Her antagonists run from wild predators to human traffickers. No life form gets precedence over another; the film sketches "a tense dog-eat-dog-eat-bird ecosystem."

The hen stays nameless and voiceless throughout, though her avian performers all receive star billing in the closing credits: Eszti, Szandi, Feri, Enci, Eti, Enikő, Nóra and Anett. Pálfi avoids direct anthropomorphism. His scripted fiction aims instead for documentary-style naturalism, a cousin to Jerzy Skolimowski's Oscar-nominated donkey odyssey "EO" — minus the expressionistic flourishes — and Robert Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthasar," minus some of its despair.

What actually happens to her?

The story begins in a cramped industrial farm in rural Greece, opened by a startlingly graphic egg-laying scene. The chick, distinguishable by her uniformly dark plumage, learns the cruelty of commercial poultry-rearing and escapes. After a chain of perilous scrapes, she lands at a coastal smallholding where a family runs a shabby café alongside less legal activities.

There she is trapped again, put to work laying eggs in the owners' coop. Pálfi leavens the material with droll music cues — the resident rooster arrives to the strains of a Grigoris Mpithikotsis romantic ballad — but the film does not shy from what amounts, for the hen, to "recurring sexual assault, and the repeated theft of her eggs." In a dark irony, a key chance at liberation comes via the owners' trafficking of refugees, and the film connects the abuse of human and animal rights into "a portrait of a world sliding off its moral axis."

How do you build a performance from eight birds?

The below-the-line craft carries the perspective. Vivid sound design keeps us inside the hen's headspace; Giorgos Karvelas' lithe cinematography tracks her rhythms of movement and flighty rebellion; and editor Lehmhényi Réka forges "one coherent and characterful performance from footage of multiple birds."

The source's verdict lands squarely: "A madly impractical and richly felt vision that pretty much required Pálfi to put all his eggs in one basket, 'Hen' is a risk that pays off in heartening style." For a director who spent two decades confounding expectations, betting the basket on a chicken looks like the shrewdest gamble of his career.