Titreenp
SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?
Micah Lloyd
Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Melanie Bouvet
The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.
Murder Slim
Knut Hamsun's novel 'Hunger' is one of the better known books of the "outsider" canon. It's a great book, but one that must have been difficult to adapt into 'Sult'. It's written in first person, and has a dreamlike and rambling feel as the starving writer battles to write a masterpiece and raise enough money for a meal.'Sult' starts worryingly. Carlsen's opening shots of the streets of Christiania (Oslo) in 1890 - with wacky carnival music for the theme tune - are reminiscent of a student film. The movie rapidly improves though... as soon as Per Oscarsson starts to act.Oscarsson genuinely looks starved and near death, with hollow eyes and a teetering walk in the wind. Yet he also captures Pontus' showy arrogance and refusal to admit to anyone that he is starving. Oscarsson walks that line perfectly, and there's enough in his looks and movement to gradually draw sympathy. I found myself willing for Pontus to just ask for help... to the point I wanted to shake him... but he ploughs resolutely on, convinced he'll write something that will blow people's minds.The film has also been criticised for portraying a stereotype of a starving artist. The counter argument is 'Sult' was one of the first literary portrayals of this stereotype. And even if Pontus isn't as much of a surprise as he would have been 40 - or 100 - years ago, the character is easily interesting enough to maintain attention. There's also plenty of black comedy in the scenes where Pontus visits the pawnbroker and offers ludicrous things for sale, while he still desperately tries to come across as moneyed and intellectual.I think Carlsen did a superb job of capturing the spirit of 'Hunger', without following it slavishly enough to hurt the visual flow. The film doesn't use lengthy voice-overs, and prefers to let the acting and the situations show Pontus' complex mental state. For that reason, 'Sult' should play for both fans of 'Hunger' and for viewers interested in outsider folks fighting to exist. Sure, the cinematography lacks flair and the movie will be too slow for some, but it's a rewarding and thought provoking movie.
Andreas Baumann
This film describes like no other movie a feeling of desperation, hunger and life's meaninglessness. You get in a horrible mood watching it, but you can't take your eyes off the screen. It reminded me a lot of "Raskolnikov" ("Crime and Punishment") by Dostojevskij and a bit of Tom Kristensen's "Hærværk" ("Vandalism"). I did not think movies could be like this - irrational, desperate and oppressive. Per Oscarsson's role as the writer Pondus is moving and exceptionally good. He seems to be a good person, but his moral is tested to the limits, when he by mistake gets too much money back in a grocery. He describes with precise accuracy the dilemma between moral and one's own needs - hunger and love. Watch it, sense it!
Prokievitch Bazarov
MESSAGES of misery and foreboding were flashed by in this great picture that was shown to me, and suddenly the air of geniality that was wafted into my surrounding was chilled.This feature was "Hunger," a Norwegian-Danish-Swedish film that depicts the miseries of a penniless would-be writer in Christiana, Norway, toward the end of the last century.It might be classed as fascinating but definitely a painful tours de forc, the first reason because of its smashing simulation of catastrophic reality, and the second because of the tormented and poignant performance Per Oscarsson gives in the principal role."Hunger," based on the novel by Knut Hamsun, is a pictorial study in a thin dramatic form of the Old-World romantic eccentricities,, hallucinations and creeping despairs of a young author dying of starvation, which he is too proud and foolish to reveal.It is brilliantly played by Mr. Oscarsson, who stretches so tightly the nerves and the muscular movements of this fellow that he communicates a racking, haunting sense of a misguided, hopeless romantic methodically choking himself. For this performance, he was given the best acting award at the Cannes Film Festival.Gunnel Lindblom is shadowy but touching in the pathetically sketchy role of a genteel young woman who is also starving and joins the writer in one pitiful grab at love. Henning Carlsen's direction is appropriately mordant and gaunt.
jonny m
Some stories are near-impossible to put on the screen, but this attempt is both honest and well done. Hamsun's fine rendition of his plight in early years to make it as writer is conveyed with insight and artistry.
