This Underrated Gem Is A Cross Between Coming-Of-Age Movie And Action Thriller

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Joe Wright is a filmmaker who’s never pigeonholed by one particular genre or style. Over the course of his career, Wright has directed all kinds of movies: wartime romance Atonement, political biopic Darkest Hour, classic literature adaptations Pride & Prejudice and Anna Karenina, and sleekly titled Peter Pan origin story Pan. He also helmed the high-octane action thriller Hanna.

Hanna reunited Wright with his Oscar-nominated Atonement star Saoirse Ronan, who plays the titular antihero. Hanna is a government experiment who was trained from birth to be a lean, mean killing machine. Ronan gives a stunning performance as usual, disappearing into the role and humanizing a genre archetype. She’s backed up by terrific supporting performances by Eric Bana as Erik Heller, the ex-CIA badass who raised Hanna, and Cate Blanchett as Marissa Wiegler, the senior CIA bureaucrat who wants her dead and sends a trio of sadistic assassins after her.

This Cult Action-Horror Gem Deconstructs Violence While Indulging In It

For the most part, Wright drapes Hanna in a Bourne-style gritty realism, but the movie also has some stylized visuals with a minimalist visual palette and lots of energetic camera movements. Narratively and aesthetically, Hanna plays like a gun-toting fairy tale. Assassin movies are always fun – Kill Bill, John Wick, The Killer, the list goes on – but they’re even more fun when the assassin is a kid. Ronan’s delightfully ruthless performance in Hanna evokes Natalie Portman’s star-making turn as 12-year-old contract killer Mathilda in Léon: The Professional. In hitman thrillers starring children, there’s a great juxtaposition between inherent innocence and cold-blooded murder.

One of the standout elements of Hanna is its