Hen
How is an egg born? Simple: it is laid, taken, packaged, sold, digested — end of story. But Hen (2025) decides to overturn the food chain of thought and ask us: what if that egg were the product of a desire, a body, a consciousness no less alive than our own? Thus begins the tragicomic and irresistibly lucid journey of a hen who, with aspirations of autonomy worthy of an existential philosopher, escapes from her farm to confront the world — both animal and human — that surrounds her, or rather, that seeks to crush her with productive efficiency and moral indifference.
Our misunderstanding of animal life is contained between two extremes: intensive farming and the zoo.
— Fabrizio Caramagna
— Fabrizio Caramagna
She is an accidental heroine, a bird with an impossible dream: to reproduce. But how can she, when every day a human steals the fruit of her womb and a rooster inflicts upon her his “music” — a grotesque version of Ravel’s Boléro, repeated on a loop like erotic-industrial torture? Thus, deprived of her egg and her freedom, the hen hides under a bed while an unsuspecting little girl eats Nutella and watches cartoons with happy chicks: a perfect parable of humanity consuming life while believing it loves it.
Fleeing, the hen traverses human and animal landscapes where the boundary between innocence and cruelty becomes absurd: clandestine markets, fires, accidents. Yes, because her egg — a symbol of denied motherhood — will end up causing a fatal incident, almost to remind us that every oppressed form of life finds a way to erupt. The world of Hen is a “world of dew and yet, and yet”: fragile, brilliant, constantly on the verge of dissolving.
Nikos, dishonest like everyone else, or perhaps only human like the rooster who will die under his motorcycle: “When one rooster dies, another is made,” popular wisdom might say, but here the phrase sounds more like a requiem of indifference.
In the seaside restaurant — established thanks to that old, reluctant sage who took care of the hen — she had found refuge, but now Bentleys arrive with their relentless criminality. Unaware, she plays with the pom-poms on the boss’s shoes, who watches her as one would watch a dish to be served: “Bring me something fresh,” he orders, immediately after giving her a piece of chicken. “They don’t hesitate to eat each other,” he comments, and he is not wrong: in the human world, cannibalization is a daily practice, just more elegant.
When the dog barks, they shoot it. The old sage is killed, and the hen pecks at him, not out of pity but to see if he is alive: an almost scientific gesture, as if she wanted to measure life with the tip of her beak. It is an Aesopian fable rewritten for the 21st century, with a corrosive moral: nature observes, man destroys, and those who remain adapt.
But in the end, after chaos, accidents, and love songs (“Your dark eyes make my heart race…” — playing as she meets a new rooster), comes the revenge. From the ashes of that struggle, chicks are born: small, fragile, alive. The hen, martyr and mother, smiles — or at least seems to — and finally claims her triumph. Resilience, for once, takes the form of a beating wing.
Hen is a kind of cinematic miracle: a film that speaks of a hen as if it were speaking of the human, and of the human as if it were speaking of a chicken coop. Pálfi and Ruttkay, with an almost comic courage, decide to do the opposite of what is expected: make the mundane sublime, the animal poetic, the everyday political.
The result is a mocking and visionary parable about the chain of life and production. Industrial farming, with its cold neon lights and perfect discipline, becomes a metaphor for modern labor: everyone produces, no one reproduces. Every egg taken from the hen is a dream stolen from those who still believe the world can change.
The protagonist’s flight, through barns, highways, and restaurant kitchens, is an existential odyssey and, at the same time, a satire of progress. The humans she meets — the old man who saves her, dishonest Nikos, the distracted little girl, the hungry boss — are archetypes of power, innocence, and hunger for control. In the end, they all share the same gaze.
Aesthetically, the film is a marvel: the camera follows the hen as a prophet follows a divine sign. Every feather is a reflection on survival, every peck a question about consciousness.
And then there are the absurd deaths — everything revolves around that egg which, like a minor god, provokes catastrophes and rebirths. But no one, not for a moment, feels that it is tragic: a cosmic, almost divine irony hovers over the film. Everyone dies, yes, but with style. And when the chicks finally arrive, one cannot help but smile: nature, after all, triumphs.
In the end, Hen answers with ancient wisdom the most pointless and yet most necessary question of all: “Which came first, the egg or the chicken?”
The answer here is obvious: the chicken. Because without her, without her madness and persistence, there would be no egg.
The answer here is obvious: the chicken. Because without her, without her madness and persistence, there would be no egg.
But…
Time is like an egg and life is like a chicken that lays it.
— Murray Schisgal
Time is like an egg and life is like a chicken that lays it.
— Murray Schisgal