Hen      Director: György Pálfi Cert: NoneGenre: DramaStarring: Ioannis Kokiasmenos, Maria Diakopanagioti, Argyris Pantazaras Running Time: 1 hr 36 minsBe warned. Hen opens with pornographic detail: an anatomical close-up of a chicken laying an egg. It’s simultaneously comic, verging on body horror, and wholly arresting.György Pálfi, the director of the cult 2006 horror hit Taxidermia, is not interested in the tasteful, wide-eyed anthropomorphism of common-or-garden nature films or Disney critters. His chicken-themed thriller is a surprising, quietly disconcerting fable told almost entirely from the perspective of a single hen.The chick that hatches during the opening shot is distinguished from the flock by her dark plumage: she’s an easily spotted protagonist in a sea of white feathers.Rejected by the machinations of industrial farming, she escapes slaughter and drifts through a hostile rural landscape with the hobo beats of such TV classics as The Fugitive or The Incredible Hulk. All the while she is driven by little more than pecking instinct and flight-or-(barely)-flight instinct.Pálfi keeps the camera low to the ground, tethered to the hen’s eye line as she navigates foxes, pigeons, indifferent humans and the endless dangers of staying alive.In common with Viktor Kossakovsky’s pig-themed Gunda and Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, human matters happen in the margins, yet they are consistently menacing. Snatches of conversation, bursts of violence and hints of corruption sketch a gangland plot and a supposedly superior species hollowed out by fear, moral exhaustion and gangsterism.The oblivious titular heroine is comparatively swashbuckling beside these compromised, weary signifiers trapped within corrupt systems they neither control nor resist. She becomes an unlikely emblem of ordinary, shifting existence under late-capitalist criminality.Pálfi never labours the allegory too hard. Instead, the increasingly fretful story accumulates through the ordinary trials and tribulations of chicken life. Mundane routines acquire a creeping dread, with barns, kitchens and farmyards becoming landscapes of unspoken terror as the heroine clucks her way through a compelling story. In cinemas from Friday, May 22nd