Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 19, 2025
The opening shot of Hen, the latest film from Hungarian director György Pálfi, is of a chicken giving birth to an egg. We see the act in full, in all its pulsing, feathery glory, then this unborn chick is quickly rolled onto the assembly line of factory farming. Eventually, our protagonist is born. She’s ragged and black-feathered, the ugly duckling, so to speak, in a coop full of golden cuties. That means she’s no good for whatever undoubtedly unpleasant future the farming bosses had for her. She’s destined for the soup pot, but this hen has bigger plans for her future. Well, that or she’s just running on instinct. Thus begins her journey.
Yes, Hen is a film from the point of view of a chicken. Movies from the perspectives of animals aren’t uncommon, especially in the indie circuit. Consider EO, the Cannes award-winning drama by Jerzy Skolimowski about a humble donkey (say the title out loud. Get it?) Eight separate chickens play the lead role here, pecking and clucking her way through life as she finds herself in a coop at a rundown seaside restaurant. It’s owned by an old man (Ioannis Kokiasmenos), who lives there with his daughter (Maria Diakopanagioti) and her child. Her crappy boyfriend (Argyris Pantazaras) has hijacked the scenic location to use as a base for his smuggling work. Vans with boxes full of hairdryers, booze, and eventually, people find their way there, and the old man seems powerless to stop it all.
Our hen has even less clout, and her priorities are much more low-key. In her new home, she has a love interest: the lone cock of the walk who is introduced with sly humour like a himbo hero from a cheesy rom-com, right before he mounts our hen in a flurry of feathers. Thus begins a cycle: sex, eggs, then the old man takes them out of the coop for his own purposes. Our hen seems bemused by it all. Where is this giant bipedal creature taking her chicks? A hole in the top of the coop allows her to make multiple escape attempts, but she always finds herself back behind the wire.
Humans love to anthropomorphise animals. Cinema is full of wisecracking talking dogs and cats that allow us to imagine dense internal lives for our beloved pets. It’s not necessarily a privilege afforded to the ones we eat, however. Cow, Andrea Arnold’s documentary about the life of one milk cow from cradle to grave, tried to present an objective but not emotionless view of the lives caught up in the machinery of human industry. Gunda offered an idyllic but performative vision of pigs in the perfect country farm until the inevitable happens. In my bête noire, My Octopus Teacher, one obsessive weirdo’s attachment to an octopus had to be desperately humanised to justify the needless ecological meddling in the creature’s quiet life.
I thought a lot about this conundrum while watching Hen, a knowingly odd movie that plays around with the ambiguity of animal autonomy. It’s all too easy for György Pálfi to frame the hen’s journey as one of long-term planning and emotional investment. Some of the music cues, including a very funny cover of ‘Bolero’, help play that out. But there is uncertainty here too. Maybe this hen is the smartest bird on the planet, but the ‘reaction shots’ are just a standard hen’s face. This is just what chickens do: they eat and sleep and lay eggs and cause havoc. They needn’t be anthropomorphized for us to be invested in that.
This hen is also an inadvertent and unjudging witness to human follies. The, at first, low-stakes smuggling ring that the old man’s crappy sorta son-in-law is a part of soon moves into something more exploitative. These gormless thugs pick up vulnerable refugees from the beach, shove them into a van, and ignore their pleas for food and water. To the hen, this spectacle is nothing, just a distraction from her more primal needs. For the old man, it’s the loss of his very soul. It’s a contrast that doesn’t always work. When the hen decides to mount a reverse-escape plan just so she can get railed by the new cock, it’s shown alongside something truly devastating. If the intention is to show the nonplussed nature of the animal’s plight versus the agony of human suffering, it needed a different musical cue. Pálfi has some nervy ideas at play here but it’s an issue when the chicken is more interesting than any of the humans. When the final act forces its focus onto the latter, the film is immediately less intriguing.
The novelty of Hen is evident but so is the craft behind it. Pálfi really does make magic with these hens. It’s with us boring humans where he struggles. This is a story that was crying out for an episodic structure rather than focusing on one group of people and their very heavy issues. It’s admirable that Pálfi wanted to bring real heft to what could have been a novelty, and there are moments where it works, but the clarity of the storytelling suffers the more it goes along. Still, those chickens, man. Icons. Legends. The moment.
Hen had its North American premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Hopefully, it will escape the coop soon and receive a wide release date.
