- UK release: May 2011
- Director: Joe Wright · Writers: Seth Lochhead, David Farr
- Studio / distributor: Focus Features; Holleran Company; Babelsberg
- Genre: Action thriller / coming-of-age spy thriller · Runtime: 111 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, The Lovely Bones) as Hanna; Eric Bana (Munich, Hulk) as Erik Heller; Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, The Lord of the Rings) as Marissa Wiegler; Tom Hollander (Pride & Prejudice) as Isaacs
- Rotten Tomatoes: 71% critics / 66% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Joe Wright has, until now, been the man you call for tasteful period prestige: Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, frocks and longing and a camera that glides through grand houses. So a propulsive Euro-thriller about a teenage assassin, scored end to end by The Chemical Brothers, is not the second album anyone expected from him. The surprise is how natural the swerve feels. The formal eye that lingered on Keira Knightley in a doorway turns out to work just as well on a girl sprinting through a shipping container, and Wright has made the rare genre film that looks and sounds like nobody else’s.
The setup
Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) has spent her whole life in a frozen forest near the Arctic circle, raised and drilled by her father Erik (Eric Bana), a former intelligence operative living off the grid. She can field-strip a rifle, speak several languages, and kill a deer with a single arrow, but she has never heard music or felt electric light. When she decides she is ready, Erik lets her flip a switch that announces their position to the people who have spent years looking for them, chief among them the brittle, immaculate CIA handler Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). What follows sends Hanna alone across Morocco, Spain and Germany, hunted and curious in equal measure, learning what the ordinary world is while trying to stay alive inside it.
The cast
The film stands or falls on Ronan, and she is extraordinary. At sixteen she carries it without strain, holding two things at once: the lethal competence of someone built to fight, and the wide-open strangeness of a child meeting the world for the first time. A scene of her flinching at a kettle, or studying a teenage girl her own age like a foreign species, lands as cleanly as any of the action. Bana underplays the father nicely, all coiled warmth and withheld information. Blanchett is having the most fun, giving Marissa a clipped Southern drawl and an obsessive’s neatness, a fairy-tale stepmother with a dental fixation and a department behind her. Tom Hollander, as the tracksuited contractor Isaacs, brings a whistling, theatrical menace that tips the film towards the grotesque in the best way.
The craft
Wright shoots this like someone who has been let off the leash. Alwin Küchler’s photography is precise and cold in the forest, then saturated and woozy once Hanna reaches the south, and there is a justly admired single take that follows Erik through a Berlin underground station and out into a brawl, the camera prowling around him as the synths build. That is the other engine here: The Chemical Brothers’ score does not sit politely under the picture, it drives it, turning chases and fights into something closer to choreography. The fairy-tale scaffolding is deliberate and out in the open, with a wolf, a wicked witch, a house in the woods and a climax at a derelict fun park. It gives a fairly slender chase plot a strange resonance it would not otherwise have.
How it stacks up
The obvious cousin is The Bourne Identity, another stripped-down European chase about a trained killer with a hole where his past should be, but Hanna is doing something odder. Where Bourne is all grounded competence, Wright wants the heightened storybook texture too. The other clear ancestor is Léon, which also paired a child and lethal violence with real tenderness, though Hanna is the assassin here rather than the apprentice. And the music-as-motor approach, the way movement and rhythm fuse, recalls Run Lola Run more than any recent spy picture. It is rare to see an action film reach for art-house reference points and a propulsive beat at the same time, and rarer still to see it pull both off.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly won over, sitting around 71%, with most of the praise going to Ronan, the action and the score, and most of the reservations to a story some find thin or wilfully eccentric. Audiences are a little cooler at 66%, which I suspect comes from viewers arriving for a straight Bourne-style thriller and getting something more peculiar. Both reactions are fair on their own terms. The plot, stripped of its styling, is slim, and the fairy-tale conceit will read as pretentious to anyone not in the mood for it. But the thinness of the story has never been what I take away from this film.
Verdict
What I take away is texture, momentum and that central performance, and on the things I most value, atmosphere, a score I want to put straight back on, and sheer rewatchability, Hanna delivers more than most of the genre. It is stylish without being hollow, strange without losing its grip, and it gives Saoirse Ronan a role that shows exactly what she can do. The story is the weakest part and the styling will not be to every taste, but I have returned to this one more often than far more acclaimed thrillers, which is the truest test I have. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow. The Chemical Brothers soundtrack is well worth seeking out alongside it.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the world of the film was later expanded into a Hanna television series (2019 to 2021) on Amazon Prime Video, which reworked the same premise across three seasons with a new cast. Saoirse Ronan went on to become one of the most nominated actors of her generation, and this still reads as an early flag of that range. The film has settled into a quiet cult reputation as one of the more distinctive action pictures of its decade, and is now available on disc and to stream or rent across the usual digital platforms.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, one use of strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of moderate action violence. Mostly, this consists of fight sequences in which crunchy punches are exchanged, but this is largely without bloodshed. There are also some stronger moments which include sight of a man having his neck cut, sight of a woman having her neck twisted, and sight of characters getting stabbed in the arm, leg or torso; however, these moments are all very brief and without an emphasis on blood or injury.
Language: There is a single use of strong language (‘f***k’), as well as milder terms including ‘shit’, ‘god’ and ‘Christ’.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
