A couple of months ago I stumbled across a gorgeous little film, The Hunter, that was in and out of the theaters faster than you can blink. I decided to go see it based on the prospect of watching Willem Dafoe, playing as the eponymous character, stalking through the Tasmanian backwoods, rifle in hand, with the stone-blue eyes of determination and patience, a deft and subtle survivalist, a thinking man’s tough guy who can gut it out in the wild for weeks on end without batting a lash. The movie was not a work of perfection—there were a few jerky moments and leaps of faulty logic that gave me pause, and I actually could have watched Dafoe silently stalk his prey out in the wild a little more than offered here, if only to get a truer sense of his isolation. But after reading the novel by Julia Leigh that inspired the film, I feel like the movie got a few more things right than the book did, which is a rarity.

I want to clarify, though, that I don't mean to say the novel wasn’t a quality read. It was, especially the internal narratives of the hunter when he is out in the wild, but the following three things stood out for me and really put the movie over the top.