Chain
A chain of eight films where the hunt is never really about the animal. Wild boar, kestrels, rabbits and pheasants watch while landowners, farmers and hired guns settle who owns the ground.
In the French countryside of Too Many Beasts (2026), wild boar tear through crops while the gentlemen's hunting club quietly feeds the game it will later shoot. The animals are the pretext; the arrangement is about who may cross whose field, who may take from it, and who pays when the ledger is finally called in. Brun, a bankrupt farmer, is pushed past endurance by the club's president and shoots him, then vanishes. A year later the volatile officer Fulda arrives to unpick a disappearance that everyone in the district has already decided to misremember. The boar keep moving through the maize, indifferent witnesses to a class war dressed as vermin control.
That is the thread this chain pulls. Hunting on screen is rarely about killing an animal; it is a ceremony of property, performed so that everyone present understands the hierarchy. The eight films gathered here move from the French fields outward, through the English coalfields, the Spanish scrub, a chateau weekend and the mud of a gold-rush town, and each one stages the chase as an audit of power. The prey is often the least important figure in the frame. What matters is who holds the gun, who owns the land, and who has been quietly designated as fair game.
Ken Loach's Kes (1969) strips the ritual down to a boy, a stolen kestrel and a mining village that has already decided his future. Carlos Saura's La caza (1966) turns a rabbit shoot into a slow unmasking of Franco's victors, three men sweating in the heat with rifles and old grievances. Jean Renoir's La Regle du jeu (1939) moves the slaughter to a country estate, where a weekend of pheasant beating and bedroom farce ends with a death that the guests politely absorb as an accident. Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) relocates the whole business to the Pacific Northwest, where fur, snow and hired killers enforce a corporate claim on a town that thought it was building itself.
Between and around those landmarks sit the lesser-known links: a British documentary about a hunt saboteur, a Portuguese parable of a landowner's last shoot, and a slow, strange film about a poacher who becomes the thing he once tracked. Watch them in order and the animal's eye becomes the only honest perspective in the room. The boar, the kestrel, the rabbit, the pheasant: each one sees the human arrangement for what it is, and none of them is consulted.
In rural France, wild boar strip the fields while a gentlemen's hunting club fattens the game it will shoot. A ruined farmer kills the club's president and disappears, leaving a volatile police officer to work out what the district has agreed to forget.
Too Many Beasts → Kes
The Link
From the French maize fields to the Yorkshire coalfield: Loach keeps the animal as witness but swaps the boar for a kestrel, a creature Billy trains rather than shoots. Both films understand that the hunt is a rehearsal for how a community treats its own poor, and that the boy and the farmer are the ones being managed.
Kes → The Hunt
The Link
Saura takes the class ritual Loach keeps at the edge of the frame and makes it the whole film. Where Kes lets the kestrel stand in for Billy's dignity, La caza lets the rabbits stand in for a defeated country, and the hunters' violence against each other is the point the animals have been watching all along.
Carlos Saura sends three veterans of Franco's side into the Spanish scrub for a day of rabbit shooting. The heat, the rabbits and the old resentments do the work, and the rifles stop pointing only at animals.
The Hunt → The Rules of the Game
The Link
Saura's scrub gives way to Renoir's manicured estate, where the pheasants are driven by beaters so the guests can shoot without leaving the lawn. The film shows the hunt as pure choreography of class: the same violence as La caza, but laundered through etiquette, and the animal's death is the only thing anyone agrees to call natural.
Jean Renoir's country-house weekend gathers aristocrats, servants and a celebrated aviator for a round of pheasant beating and marital manoeuvring. The shoot is organised with military precision, and the death that closes the party is absorbed as a social inconvenience.
The Rules of the Game → McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Link
Renoir's estate becomes Altman's frontier town, and the pheasant shoot becomes a corporate hit. Where the French guests politely ignore a death, Altman's killers are paid wages for theirs, and the film makes explicit what La Regle du jeu only implies: the hunt is a business arrangement, and the prey is whoever holds the weakest claim.
Robert Altman's snowbound western follows a gambler and a brothel madam building a business in a Pacific Northwest mining town, until a corporation decides the claim is worth more than they are. Leonard Cohen's songs drift over the mud like a funeral.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller → The Shooting Party
The Link
Altman's hired guns give way to Bridges's Edwardian beaters, and the class violence becomes almost invisible, folded into tweed and courtesy. The film is the missing link between Renoir's chateau and Loach's village: the same shoot, the same ownership, but filmed at the moment the whole arrangement is about to be conscripted and destroyed.
Alan Bridges adapts Isabel Colegate's novel about a 1913 shooting weekend on an English estate, where the guests' certainty about their world is undercut by the sound of a distant war and a poacher's quiet defiance. James Mason gives one of his last performances as the old man who refuses to shoot.
The Shooting Party → The Year of the Hare
The Link
Bridges shows the shoot from the beaters' side; Jarva shows what happens when a man crosses over to the animal's side entirely. The hare here is not prey but a witness who reorganises a life, and the film extends the chain's argument that the hunted creature sees the human arrangement more clearly than anyone holding a gun.
Risto Jarva's Finnish comedy follows a journalist who hits a hare with his car, abandons his job and his marriage to nurse the animal, and drifts into a life of odd jobs and forest encounters. The hare becomes a companion, a conscience and a reason to refuse the city.
The Year of the Hare → The Wild Boar
The Link
Jarva's hare leads back to the boar that opened the chain, closing the circle. Where Too Many Beasts began with farmers and a gentlemen's club at open war, this final film lets the animal's perspective hold the frame, and the hunt becomes what the whole sequence has been building towards: a reckoning in which the land remembers who actually worked it.
A contemporary Portuguese parable in which a landowner's final boar hunt becomes a reckoning with the workers he has spent a lifetime displacing. The forest closes in, the dogs lose the scent, and the prey turns out to have been standing on the other side of the line all along.
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