Chicken run: "Hen"

Here's an unexpected comeback. The writer-director György Pálfi emerged at the turn of the century as the mad professor of Hungarian cinema, compiling one-of-a-kind films from a variety of diverse and unusual angles. 2002's Hukkle, a U-rated symphony of the natural world, was followed by the raw meat of 2006's Taxidermia, a decidedly 18-rated study of human flesh and blood that repelled almost as many spectators as it compelled. Two decades on, Pálfi returns with - and no, I swear I'm not making this up - a movie shot largely from the perspective of an errant chicken. The 15-rated Hen splits the difference between this unique filmmaker's breakthrough works: the singular path it follows allows us to see, on one side, the wonders of nature and, on the other, the horrors of the human sphere. Opening on a tight close-up of creation - an egg emerging from a cloaca - it then plunges us into the ever-staggering processes of factory farming. The egg is warmed, and a chick eventually breaks out; the chick is funnelled through slides and chutes and into a heavily crowded barn, where she grows up. Our heroine is, as it were, a black sheep, her inky colouration distinguishing her from the mass of Easter-yellow and snow-white birds she's farmed with; she will, indeed, be rejected from this process for being different, less saleable, at which point Hen begins to assume an air of the sociopolitical. Initially earmarked for inclusion in a trucker's soup, she escapes at a service station, and thereafter proceeds to having marvellous, sometimes alarming adventures along an especially sunsoaked stretch of the Greek coast. For long stretches, Hen resembles a live-action version of those animations we show our young, or an ultra-leftfield item of the Incredible Journey/Homeward Bound/Babe school; you may at an early point expect the protagonist to start clucking with the voice of a Kate McKinnon or an Olivia Colman.

But no, because this is an actual hen - beady of eye, scarlet of wattle - albeit one who's been granted the kind of close-ups typically reserved for actresses with L'Oréal contracts. Furthermore, she's an actual hen who's been loosed on the real world, where - even after leaving behind the factory-farming environment - death lurks around every other corner. A riotous early setpiece, likely to stand among the summer's best, answers the age-old question of why the chicken crossed the road, in this case a perilously busy carriageway: she was being pursued by a ravenous fox. (Here we should credit the three "stunt chickens" listed in the closing credits, named as Jackie 1, 2 and 3.) Perhaps Pálfi's film is more readily compared to 1998's Babe: Pig in the City, a euphemistic way of warning animal lovers to approach with some degree of caution: you will, I think, spend much of Hen praying for a happy ending in the form of a "no animals were harmed" disclaimer. (Spoiler alert: there is one.) It's not just that the hen has to dodge that fox and a no less hungry-looking hawk (introduced polishing off a fieldmouse without much in the way of contrition); she will also be snatched up at one point in the jaws of a hound and carried right back into the hands of those pesky humans, always plotting and scheming, quick to anger, invariably peckish. Here, Hen crosses paths with the methodology of the recent EO (after Bresson, about a donkey), Gunda (about a pig) and Cow (about a cow): we're looking at humankind through the eyes of one of those poor, unfortunate creatures obliged to share a planet, or just a backyard, with humankind. To borrow a Manny Farberism that sort of fits the bill, those earlier works were white elephant movies, films in which a director bore down on their animal subjects with the intention of Saying Something Despairingly Profound about the world these beasts were led through, kicking and squealing.

Led instead by Pálfi's far lighter touch, Hen reveals itself as a prime instance of termite art, scratching around at ground level with its subject, and seeing what truths these talons scuff up. Although this chicken's legs carry her within touching distance of a prominent theme in contemporary European cinema - and although her eyes appear to register their fair share of human folly - Hen feels like another of this director's experiments rather than any didactic statement, seizing the opportunity to see how far one might take a chicken for a walk. As an experiment, Hen proves surprisingly successful and engaging. Even amid its occasional dramatic lulls - such as a first-half diversion into a freer-range form of farming - the eye is drawn by Pálfi's virtuosic choices: layering Ravel's "Bolero" over footage of the hen clucking around a yard, allowing the hen to waddle into the bedroom of a child watching a documentary about dinosaurs (thereby presenting our heroine with a moving cave painting of her ancestors), a makeover sequence that demonstrates - after a lot of evidence to the contrary - just how hospitable we humans can be at our best. From around the halfway point, Pálfi and co-writer/wife Zsófia Ruttkay offer us two films for the price of one: the chicken's journey, and a drama about those humans pushed into the background. (There are, believe it or not, points where the two stories intersect, and we're led to wonder whether this chicken can pull a Lassie Come Home and save the day. But, again, no: she's just hen.) What's upfront, a feat of staging and editing, is all the more remarkable for the unified and expressive-seeming performance Pálfi has coaxed out of the eight (count 'em) chickens credited as playing the lead role: this, truly, is the Belmondo of birds, climbing, clambering, strutting and posing, taking a delight in her own freedom, and even throwing herself into a late-breaking romance with a brooding cock called Titan. A question: just how much birdseed did Pálfi get through here?

Hen opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.