Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: György Pálfi
Starring: Yannis Kokiasmenos, Maria Diakopanayotou, Argyris Pandazaras
If the Academy Awards had a Best Animal Wrangling category, the 2026 Oscar would surely go to Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi's Hen. Falling somewhere between Babe: Pig in the City and Bresson's Au hazard Balthazar, Hen sees Pálfi defiantly dismiss the film industry warning of never working with animals. As its title suggests, Hen's protagonist is a female chicken, played by eight different black hens, each of which possessed a uniquely fitting skill set. Some were good at running, some at pecking, some at reacting. The work of all eight birds blend seamlessly to create the illusion that we are watching a singular performance.
Set in Greece, Hen opens with our heroine hatching from an egg in a factory farm. Add a Philip Glass score and this sequence, which details the cold industrial practice of such farming, could be a scene from a Godfrey Reggio documentary. A few months later the chick has grown into a hen and flees the farm. The first act will be familiar to anyone who has seen the likes of The Incredible Journey or Babe: Pig in the City, with our diminutive leading lady dodging traffic, foxes and eagles as she finds her way to Giorgio (Yannis Kokiasmenos), an elderly man in the process of renovating his crumbling restaurant. Giorgio cleans up the hen's wounds and adds her to his crowded chicken coop.
If that opening act plays like a classic Disney family movie, things take a considerably dark turn when we discover the true horror of Giorgio's situation. To stay afloat, he has gotten himself involved with smugglers. He was initially fine with the crates of booze and cigarettes they store at his place, but they have since moved into people smuggling, picking up asylum seekers on the coast and hiding them in Giorgio's shed.
The influence of Bresson is explicit, with Pálfi using the story of an animal to highlight human cruelty. Here, however, the cruelty isn't inflicted on the chicken, who fares better than the humans in her periphery. There may be a loveable bird in the foreground, but in the background an unsettling story of inhumanity is playing out in grisly detail. The depravity on display may prove too much for some viewers (especially those who judged Hen on its deceptively cute trailer), but Pálfi is making an important point about how groups like asylum seekers have been dehumanised. The movie is manufactured in a way that makes us care more about a chicken than a faceless group of desperate humans, but you have to assume that is very much on purpose. There is ultimately a suggestion that humanity's stay on this earth may be fleeting in the grand scheme of things, and that the natural world will carry on without us if/when we eventually destroy ourselves, like the plant life that currently flourishes in the ruins of Chernobyl.
Whether you view Hen's narrative as a piece of activism or simply distasteful exploitation of a hot button issue, you can't deny the technical quality of its filmmaking. Taking a cue from Tom & Jerry cartoons and Spielberg's E.T., Pálfi shoots his film largely from the chicken's level, often giving us a literal bird's eye view of the world. There are skilfully constructed "action" sequences that must have been a nightmare to shoot, reliant as they are on the coordination of both human and animal performers. While CG is used to remove the presence of animal handlers, every creature seen in the film is very real. No fake anthropomorphism has been deployed here. If we recognise any emotions or personality in the chicken it's because we can see a humanity in its expressive eyes that is ironically absent from most of the film's actual human characters.
Hen is in UK/ROI cinemas from May 22nd.
