Review of Joe Wright's 'Hanna'

Some critics have called Hanna a modern-day fairytale, and even without the heavy-handed references to the Brothers Grimm, it's easy to see why. The naive princess (Ronan), curious about the world outside her castle (a dilapidated shed in this case), ventures out into the big bad world to smite the evil witch (Blanchett), aided along the way by wellwishers and do-gooders that teach her a thing or two about life outside her sheltered existence. With guns.

Hanna might be best described as a sort of psychedelic action thriller, a surreal tale helmed by Joe Wright thickly laying on the garish colour and directing with his usual dizzying visual panache (including many more of his already-renowned tracking shots). But the truth is there's so much going on in Hanna that you could place it within one of many brackets. It's also a road-trip movie, a coming-of-age tale, a romance with flecks of dark comedy, an exploration of culture-clash, a revenger, a (SPOILER ALERT!) sci-fi...

What holds all the pieces together, I can't say, but something about Hanna works beautifully. Perhaps that's why Seth Lochhead and David Farr's script was on the Hollywood blacklist of best unproduced scripts in both 2006 and 2009; that and their tight plotting and eye for colourful characters. In particular, I enjoyed watching Tom Hollander bring to life the sleazy German assassin Isaacs, with his ambiguous sexuality and unhinged personality, but even the bit-parters feel invested with a lot of time and care.

But Hanna is, in truth, a film with its primary strengths found in the execution rather than the source material. Joe Wright I've already mentioned, the Atonement and Pride & Prejudice director making a surprisingly strong foray away from emotional drama into a primarily action-orientated picture. Fight/chase scenes are shot with clarity and simplicity, Wright wisely avoiding to imitate Hollywood's confusing jump cut-mania and realising that the best action sequences should let what's going on inside the frame do the talking.

Wright also - as always - chooses the best actors to fill his roles. Hollander, working with Wright for the third time, clearly has the most fun, but you know Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett are safe bets. Ronan, whom Wright made a star of in Atonement (still his finest feature, though Hanna isn't far behind), is bound to be propelled much further off the back of this film, and deservedly so. We're in Hanna's presence from start to finish, as she darts breathlessly from anonymous tundra to anonymous desert to anonymous Germany (all wonderfully-chosen locations), and Ronan always has the audience's attention.

And it'd be criminal not to mention the musical score by The Chemical Brothers, which manages to get pulses racing one minute and invest emotional heft in the film the next. 'Hanna's Theme', for one, is simply a beautiful piece of work. It's another triumph for musicians creating original music for the movies after Daft Punk (Tron Legacy) and Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner (Submarine) both produced exceptional work while making the leap to movie soundtracks recently.

Hanna is a surprising film. It turns a pulpy idea into something approaching high art, mixing thrilling action and mainstream conventions with arthouse leanings; most unpredictable is the feeling of real sadness that lingers at the end of this surreal and utterly captivating revenge flick. See it for its originality, its strange yet successful mesh of ideas, and perhaps the best OST you'll hear all year.