Why did the chicken cross the road? In “Hen,” the answer is, as ever, to get to the other side. But the stakes are a little higher and more urgent than that in György Pálfi unassuming marvel of a creature feature: When its gallinaceous protagonist is forced across a busy highway, it’s because a hungry fox is very much on her tailfeathers. That hunter and prey in this scenario are both played by real live animals is a large part what makes “Hen” riveting: Made without CGI, with a predominantly non-human ensemble that includes eight fowl playing the lead role alone, it’s a sustained cinematic feat of fauna-wrangling unlike any other. But it’s not the miraculous novelty of the production that crosses your mind as you’re watching: In the moment, your heart pounds for that poor, dumb but surprisingly resourceful chicken, and you lock completely into her simultaneously small and vast survival saga.
Coming from most filmmakers, “Hen” — which premiered in Toronto’s Platform competition last year, earning an honorable mention from the jury — would count as an eccentric project. But from Hungarian auteur Pálfi, whose consistently experimental oeuvre includes 2006’s Cannes-selected, shape-shifting body horror “Taxidermia” and 2018’s labyrinthine mixed-media Stanislaw Lem adaptation “His Master’s Voice,” this may be the most narratively conventional film he’s ever assembled: a grandly linear hero’s journey in which the hero just happens to be a resplendently scarlet-combed and treacle-plumed chicken, whose antagonists along the way run the gamut from wild predators to human traffickers. No life form is given precedence over another, as “Hen” limns a tense dog-eat-dog-eat-bird ecosystem — the world we all know and struggle through, just from a different vantage point.
The hen in question remains nameless and voiceless from beginning to end — though the birds playing her all get star billing by name in the closing credits. (Eszti, Szandi, Feri, Enci, Eti, Enikő, Nóra and Anett, to give them their due.) Pálfi has little interest in directly anthropomorphic storytelling, and while his film is a rather eventfully scripted fiction, it aims for documentary-style naturalism and spontaneity. The obvious recent comparison point is Jerzy Skolimowski’s Oscar-nominated donkey odyssey “EO,” minus that film’s more expressionistic flourishes; Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthasar,” too, minus at least some of its despairing tragedy.
It begins in a cramped industrial farm somewhere in rural Greece, where the hen’s life begins with a startlingly graphic egg-laying scene. (If you’ve ever wondered what a chicken’s cloaca looks like up close, Pálfi has you covered.) After the fledgling chick cracks her way into the outside world — standing out from the vast crowd with her uniformly dark plumage — she soon learns the cruel ways of commercial poultry-rearing and, in time, seeks a different destiny. A heart-in-mouth chain of circumstances enables her escape; via a serious of perilous scrapes, she eventually winds up at a coastal smallholding, owned by a family who get by running a shabby café on the premises, alongside other, less legal activities.
There, she finds herself trapped again in the owners’ chicken coop, and put to work laying eggs: a less grim fate than the one that awaited her in the farm where she was born, perhaps, but an unhappy one just the same. Though Pálfi lightens matters with some droll music cues — the coop’s resident rooster is introduced to the grandiose strains of a romantic ballad by Greek favorite Grigoris Mpithikotsis — the film doesn’t shy from the traumatizing impact of what effectively amounts, for our feathered heroine, to recurring sexual assault, and the repeated theft of her eggs.
And so she escapes, thrillingly, and more than once — motivated, it seems, by little more than some unknowing, unspoken sense that there has to be something else out there for her. In a particularly dark stab of irony, a key chance at liberation comes via her owners’ reckless venture into the trafficking of refugees. Though “Hen” maintains a sly comic sensibility throughout, there’s solemn substance to how it shows the interconnected abuse of human and animal rights alike, adding up to a portrait of a world sliding off its moral axis.
That deft command and calibration of tone is as remarkable as the film’s seamless technical fluency, with every below-the-line contribution vital in cleaving to the chicken’s perspective. Vividly detailed sound design keeps us in her tiny headspace; ditto Giorgos Karvelas’ lithe, nimble cinematography, fully alert to her rhythm of movement and occasional, unpredictable moments of flighty rebellion. Editor Lehmhényi Réka, meanwhile, achieves the extraordinary feat of forging one coherent and characterful performance from footage of multiple birds — a patchworked star turn that invites and earns our complete emotional investment. 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.