The Hunter, review - Telegraph 15 cert, 102 min Dir: Daniel Nettheim; Starring: Willem Dafoe, Frances O'Connor, Sam Neill Perhaps it's his hawk's beak or eagle eyes, but there's something fundamentally outdoorsy about Willem Dafoe. He's always exposed himself to trials by the elements, whether as versions of Christ (including the one he played in Platoon) or in Antichrist. He's often portrayed roving field operatives (The English Patient, Clear and Present Danger) who look like they need a decent night's sleep. You could suit Dafoe up and chain him to a desk, but he wouldn't look comfortable. He's very good in The Hunter, a ruggedly gorgeous, interestingly oblique Australian drama, as Martin David, a mercenary who lives by traps and his wits, seemingly connected to no one. He's sent out by a murky biotech firm to bring them the last-sighted example of an extremely rare marsupial, the Tasmanian Tiger (in the real world, it's assumed to be extinct). Hostility from the locals is close to instant, even though Martin's pretending to be a conservationist researching the Tasmanian devil instead; the last fellow to be tasked with Tiger-finding vanished without trace, leaving a wife (grief-addled Frances O'Connor) and two children bereft among his bric-a-brac. Daniel Nettheim's movie is adapted from Julia Leigh's 1999 debut novel, and made me itch to read it. There's a gripping moral weight to the questions of survival and profiteering the story raises, and the worryingly inexact moment when our interest in endangered species tips over into thoughts of human gain. Nettheim's deliberate pacing does quiet justice to these ideas rather than allowing suspense to drown them out, though there's one heart-in-mouth sequence of struggle late on, and Dafoe's whole mission is eerie and troubling enough to carry the picture along as a muted kind of thriller. The Tasmanian landscapes, sublime but not without a brutal menace of their own, are undoubtedly another star, and one worth drinking in on the biggest possible screen: the desolate grandeur of the backdrop, and the piercing sadness of Dafoe's final confrontation, need scale to hit home.