Hanna Is A Rare Beast Of A Spy Thriller — And One Of The Best Of The 2010s
Hell is a teenage girl.
There is an image from Hanna, a rare pivot from director Joe Wright, that I haven’t thought about since the film’s premiere in 2011. But the moment I caught a glimpse of then-15-year-old Saoirse Ronan, bleach-blonde brows turning her blue eyes even icier, bow and arrow in hand, I recalled my obsession with the film in a rush of out-of-body clarity. Hanna was something like wish fulfillment when it hit theaters 15 years ago. Wright had already endeared himself to the teen girl audience with the one-two punch of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement — but with the 2010s came an experimental phase, and it effectively began with this wild hodge-podge of a movie that slots somewhere between dark fairytale, coming-of-age movie, and spy thriller. Critics might not have known what to make of its story then, but at 15, the same age as Ronan’s eponymous heroine, Wright’s pivot into punk rock spoke to the burgeoning punk in me.
After back-to-back period romances, Wright was keen to deconstruct the reputation he’d so effortlessly built with his feature debut and sophomore triumph. “I wanted to smash it all up a bit, really,” he told IndieWire at the time. “I love the idea that we are free to change and develop. I think the idea of making the same type of film throughout your career would be really boring.”
“Boring,” Hanna certainly is not. Based on a story by screenwriter Seth Lochhead, the film follows a young girl (Ronan) who’s lived her entire life in a remote strip of the Arctic, learning how to hunt and fight from her father (Eric Bana). A rogue CIA agent who deserted the agency after Hanna’s birth, Bana’s Erik is quietly bracing for the day when Hanna’s skills will be put to the test. Her first mission will be to assassinate Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), Erik’s former handler, and Hanna’s zippy first act has a lot of fun establishing the enmity between the two parties.
Once Hanna is unleashed, Wright revels in paranoid camera movements that kilter and twirl around his subject, and rapid cuts that personify her sensory overload. Ronan embodies Hanna’s earnest attempts to be steely and deadly as well as her stilted naïveté. Sure, she’s been trained how to snap a human neck with maximum efficiency, and build an airtight cover story, but she’s got no idea what it is to just... be a girl. When she happens upon a bohemian British family traveling through Morocco and, against all odds, bonds with their outspoken teen daughter (Jessica Barden), she stumbles into a crash course of teenhood that’s equal parts endearing — maybe even a little romantic — and embarrassing by association. It’s a detour in every sense, as she’s supposed to meet her father in Berlin to complete her first mission. But with Wiegler and her global contacts (including a creepy German assassin played by Tom Hollander) hot on her tail, the happy ending she seeks will be hard won, if she can win it at all.
Wicked witches and big, bad wolves take on subtler forms in Hanna.
It’s the fairytale elements that bridge the gap between quiet childlike wonder and its dark adult themes, with Hanna’s journey taking on the classic beats of tales like Alice in Wonderland or Hansel and Gretel. The Brothers Grimm is a major touchstone for Hanna: among other allusions to their work, our heroine is instructed to meet her father at “Grimm’s house,” a shack within a defunct amusement park. Wiegler is likened to a wicked witch; Hollander’s bogeyman, Isaacs, is a bit like the big, bad wolf. Per Lochhead, Wright strove to strengthen the fairytale allegory wherever possible. “He found an amazing way to give a literal interpretation to the story’s subtext,” the writer told Focus. “For him, the story, with its dark woods and wicked witch, was a fairy tale.”
The score, composed by the Chemical Brothers, pulls more than its weight, too. The soundscape they build rides on the coattails of the poppy, electronic soundtracks that disrupted the status quo in 2010 but have since become a new kind of classic — think Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy score, or Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ work on The Social Network. Back then, this trend was really only just beginning, and Hanna slots perfectly into the rising tide, supplying throbbing synths for its white-knuckle action sequences and twinkling instrumentals for Hanna’s internal monologue. It all spoke to the angsty tempest plaguing many a girl’s inner world, the struggle to let go of childish things and embrace a new idea of womanhood. That struggle is easy to take for granted, but 15 years on, few have made it feel quite so strong as Hanna.
