Critics Campus 2026 participant Guy Webster examines how observation, obfuscation and cruelty cleverly come together in György Pálfi’s offbeat bird’s-eye-view film, which skewers the inhumanity at the core of some human institutions – along with nature’s inherent apathy towards us.

As a kid, I was obsessed with trying to get the chickens on my family’s farm to look at me. With handfuls of seed, I’d wander up to the coop, crouch down to get on their level and try to coax them into some sort of human–animal connection that would transcend language and reveal the mysteries of the animal kingdom. I had also just seen Babe (1995), which led me to believe there was a mysterious shared language between poultry that I needed to access to become the main character in my sequel. Looking back at myself squatting in chicken shit and holding seed next to my eyes in front of a flock of hens, I think I was also trying to stand out as somehow more than just their owner. When a hen pecked my eyelid, I got my first hilarious taste of nature’s indifference towards me. I ran away crying. But good for her; she needed to eat.

In Hen, György Pálfi’s darkly comic animal-adventure flick about a black leghorn hen that escapes a factory farm, the Hungarian director explores what happens when characters and viewers who want to feel their humanity affirmed by nature instead encounter nature’s humbling indifference. I went into that chicken coop as a kid hoping to make a hen part of my personalised Babe follow-up; a hen made me into its food. I was trying to retrofit the chook into my anthropomorphised idea of her; she was seeing my eyelid as a treat, as prey.

Hen joins a slew of recent dialogue-light, animal-led films re-examining our relationship with the natural world: Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow (MIFF 2024), Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (MIFF 2022), Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda (2020) and Andrea Arnold’s Cow (MIFF 2021). Pálfi is less sentimental than his predecessors. Though Hen is his most palatable film to date, it retains the formalist style of his impressionistic feature debut Hukkle (MIFF 2003) and the satirical edge of his body horror Taxidermia (MIFF 2006). Rather than simply adding a leghorn hen to Old MacDonald’s cinematic universe, he tests this emerging trend. Our titular avian protagonist journeys through modern-day Greece, from crowded market stalls to pro-migration protests, pecking holes in the rubrics we use to determine what is human and what isn’t – who is human enough, and who isn’t. Eventually, her odyssey lands her in an unused restaurant by the coast that hides a gang-run business trafficking refugees. There, Pálfi stages his meta-commentary on this surge of poignant animal adventures, forcing us to encounter the limits of our ability to relate to this hen: to feel for her, to understand her. For the director, the question becomes: why do we need to?

When we first meet our heroine, she is an object being prepared to be sold, an egg dropped onto a conveyor belt and pulled away from the screeching chicken that laid it into the whirring machinery of a factory farm. A metal arm stamps the egg with a barcode; another puts it in a carton that is pushed into a mass incubator. When our eponymous lead eventually emerges from under an eggshell, the rough hands of masked workers throw her from one conveyor belt to the next, unaffected by her full-throated tweets and pointlessly flapping wings. She is one among thousands of others. But these workers are not being cruel in their apathy, just efficient. On the factory floor, the distinctions between human and animal are secondary to that of worker and product.

Hen

It would be easy to play up the cruelty of this opening sequence. But Pálfi presents the brutality of the factory line with all the childish whimsy of the opening of Rugrats. Hundreds of chicks slide down metal ramps underscored by Szabolcs Szõke’s bouncing xylophone trills, or are violently pushed through metal funnels to the upbeat ringing of tubular bells. It’s Pálfi doing Disney, muting the violence of these moments by presenting them as if these chicks are doing slapstick comedy bits. He’ll repeat this formula throughout, framing episodes of increasing violence with a neutral, often wry detachment that belies their macabre and often gut-wrenching extremity. Pálfi knows that the only real difference between a predator tearing apart its prey and a consumer consuming a chicken breast is that the latter has obscured the violence that produced it.

Once the filmmaker starts subjecting humans to similar moments of brutality, he underlines the political significance of the very idea of obfuscation. Pálfi wasn’t able to film Hen in Hungary because the government was concerned it would cast their national farming methods in a bad light. Hungary at that time had been subject to over a decade of human rights violations under prime minister Viktor Orbán (whose Fidesz regime only lost government in May of this year), including unlawful and often violent pushbacks against refugees at the Serbian border and a state of emergency that was indefinitely extended over six-month intervals.

For the first half of Hen, every moment of violence or viciousness is exclusively the protagonist’s to bear: a fox attacks her, a dog carries her to the seaside in its grinning mouth, a down-and-out restaurateur steals her eggs, a fugly rooster tries to court her, and a child points and laughs when it catches her staring at a T-Rex on the television. But around the halfway point, she stumbles into a human-trafficking plot. Suddenly, rather than being subject to these various cruelties, she becomes an indifferent witness to them. The parallels between the treatment of these refugees and the factory farm she escaped are clear: like those chicks, the former are dehumanised to the point of becoming objects. Likewise, the hen’s passive witnessing parallels our own. The muted violence of Hen’s most confronting scenes replicate the infrastructures of agriculture and governance that obscure the violence that maintains them. Humans are treated like livestock; livestock are treated like objects; and those with the power to stop this treatment insist that they are being preyed upon, while those who witness it are unable to feel its reality.

Hen ends with one more image of brutality: baby chicks casually pecking at a man’s exposed brain with the simple, amoral logic of the natural world: eat or be eaten. Our lead hen traipses through an empty house, nipping at family photos that mean nothing to her and laying eggs among the plush toys of a child who has left them behind. We’ve spent an entire film learning her language and watching her grow up. But by the end, she’s entirely inscrutable. She keeps her chicks warm in a home where our inability to understand her is no longer a problem that needs to be solved – where her existence is no longer an allegory for our humanity. She does not need to be more than she is to deserve her freedom. As her chicks pick at the man’s open wound, she stares at the camera for a second before craning her neck up towards the ceiling, looking at something we can’t see.

Hen screens in Melbourne cinemas on Monday 10, Wednesday 12 and Monday 17 August and in regional cinemas on Sunday 16 and Sunday 23 August as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.