Film

Hanna

Name: Hanna
Genre: Action, Thriller, Adventure
Released: 2011
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander, Jessica Barden

Hanna is a fairy tale with a sniper rifle: Joe Wright's stylish chase thriller follows a teenage girl raised in Arctic isolation to be an unstoppable weapon, only for her father's past to catch up with them both. Saoirse Ronan is coiled and unnerving, Cate Blanchett a chilling storybook witch, and the Chemical Brothers' pulsing score turns every set-piece into a fever dream. Brutal, beautiful, occasionally a little silly.

TMDb rating

6.6

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The blueprint for Hanna's tender-killer template: a hitman and a young girl form a strange, protective family under threat, violence and vulnerability sitting side by side. Jean Reno's stillness makes the brutality land harder.

But The central relationship courts real discomfort, and some will find its tenderness harder to sit with than the shootouts.

Kill Bill: Vol. 12003

Tarantino's operatic revenge saga shares Hanna's love of fairy-tale violence—training montages, mythic villains, a woman built into a weapon by men who underestimate her. Endlessly stylish, wildly entertaining, unmistakably cinema.

But Cartoonish gore and genre pastiche throughout; if Hanna's violence already felt heightened, this turns it up considerably further.

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Charlize Theron out-cools everyone in a neon Cold War Berlin, throwing punches to a synth soundtrack that does exactly what the Chemical Brothers did for Hanna—make violence feel like music.

But Plot is deliberately murky and secondary to spectacle; go in for the fights and the look, not the espionage logic.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Night of the Hunter1955

Hanna is explicitly structured as a Brothers Grimm story with a modern arsenal; this is the film that got there first, with a genuinely monstrous villain and children fleeing through folklore-thick American landscape instead of European capitals.

Robert Mitchum's preacher-predator stalking two children down a moonlit river is American cinema's original fairy-tale thriller—the film Hanna's storybook logic descends from, decades before anyone thought to update it with guns.

But Black-and-white, theatrical, and slower than modern chase thrillers—it asks patience of viewers used to Hanna's kinetic pace.

The Bourne Identity2002

The original amnesiac-assassin-on-the-run template, minus fairy-tale trimmings—a manufactured killer trying to remember who he was before the agency made him, hunted across Europe by his own former employers.

But More grounded and procedural than Hanna's storybook stylisation; the shaky-cam action has aged into a genre cliché by now.

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Luc Besson's original trained-killer-escapes-her-handlers thriller, years before Hanna or its American remakes existed—cooler, colder, and rawer than what came after, with a genuinely unsettling sense of institutional menace.

But Slower and more clinical than modern action fans might expect; the emotional beats are muted rather than melodramatic.

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Angelina Jolie as a sleeper agent whose entire identity turns out to be a lie, sprinting through set-piece after set-piece to outrun the truth about who made her and why.

But Plot twists strain credulity even by spy-thriller standards, and the ending clearly hoped for a sequel that reshuffled everything.

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A child raised and drilled by a vengeful father into a weapon, played for gleeful, blood-soaked comic-book excess rather than tragedy—the dark comedy version of Hanna's premise.

But The violence involving a pre-teen character is played for laughs, which some viewers understandably find queasy rather than funny.

Colombiana2011no page yet

A girl trained from childhood to become a precise, patient assassin, hunting down the people who killed her parents—Besson's fingerprints are all over this one too, unsurprisingly.

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Frantic, over-the-top training-into-destiny thriller about an ordinary man discovered to be the son of a legendary assassin—trashy, kinetic fun if you want the volume turned up.

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The Act of Killing2012

Hanna asks, in fairy-tale terms, what a person raised and trained solely to kill actually becomes; this documentary asks the same question about real men, with none of the stylisation to soften it, and the answer is far worse.

A documentary in which real death-squad leaders reenact their killings for the camera, cheerfully, sometimes in musical numbers—a genuinely unnerving look at what it actually means to manufacture a killer, no metaphor required.

But This is a serious, disturbing documentary about real atrocity, not entertainment in any conventional sense—it will sit with you uncomfortably.

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Strip away the violence and Hanna's engine is a child-of-spies coming-of-age story; Spy Kids runs the identical premise through a completely different register, proving how much tone alone can change a story's meaning.

The exact same premise—a child raised by secret-agent parents, trained for danger from birth—played entirely straight-faced for gadget-filled family fun instead of grim mythology. Genuinely funny, genuinely inventive, zero body count.

But It's a kids' movie, unapologetically; the tonal whiplash from Hanna's brutality will be considerable, and that's rather the point.