- Film Title: Hen (Κότα)
- Cast: Ioannis Kokiasmenos (Giorgio, the restaurant owner), Maria Diakopanagioti (The Woman), Argyris Pantazaras (The Man), Eleni Apostolopoulou (Little Girl), Mahmod Bamerny (Smuggler 1), Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos (Bodyguard), Antonis Kafetzopoulos (Smuggler Boss) — with the title role played by eight trained hens (Feri, Anett, Nóra, Eti, Szandi, Enci, Eszter, Enikő) and roosters Árpi and Rozsdás
- Director: Pálfi György
- Writer: Pálfi György, Ruttkay Zsófia
- Executive Prodiced by Ari Aster.
- Production: View Master Films, Pallas Film, Twenty Twenty Vision, in co-production with Focusfox and ZDF/ARTE, in association with E.R.T. and The Post Republic. Executive produced by Ari Aster.
- Distribution: Dekanalog
- Release Date: Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival September 8th, 2025. Wide release November 6th, 2026.
- Watched on: Screener
- Review by: Mother of Movies
The main review is spoiler-free. A locked section further down covers where the human story goes, and how it ends. Don’t open it until you’ve watched.
Hen Review: A Chicken’s Memoir
I nearly bailed on Hen in the first ten seconds. A close-up of a chicken’s backside laying an egg, cut straight into a hard look at how commercial poultry farming actually operates. I spent a year and a half in recruitment at an abattoir. I didn’t work the floor myself, but I did the induction tour, and staff came to me when they needed medical attention after something went wrong out there. I thought a film like this would be fun… The opening had me thinking I’d end up off eggs entirely. It never actually goes there, but for a minute I believed it would.
Then it does something I did not see coming. It leaves the farm entirely and just follows one hen. A truck driver pulls her off the transport truck to take home for his wife instead. For soup. She slips loose at a petrol station, and from there Hen becomes this strange, gorgeously shot memoir of one bird just being a bird. She outruns a fox. She gets buried in a truckload of corn and claws her way out. A dog named Titan snatches her up and delivers her, completely by accident, into the single best thing that could have happened to her.
What I kept noting, and kept being impressed by, is that she’s never reacting to any of this the way the camera makes it look like she’s reacting. There’s no inner monologue, no plan. She’s just instinctively herself the entire time, driven by nothing more complicated than wanting to hatch an egg. The filmmaking makes her feel like a character with stakes. She’s just a chicken doing chicken things, and somehow that’s more affecting, not less. I gasped and fretted alot while watching this.
Giorgio, and the Tavern That Changes Everything
Titan belongs to a crumbling seaside tavern run by a man named Giorgio, and this is where Hen stops being a cute animal adventure and turns into something I was not remotely braced for. Giorgio takes her in, builds her a little shelter, nurses her through injury later on, and none of that tenderness needs a single line of dialogue to explain itself. I was fully invested in a chicken’s emotional arc by the halfway mark, which is not a sentence I expected to write this year.
The pecking order at the tavern is its own vicious little society. Feathers missing, hierarchy enforced, a rooster running the show the way roosters do and Hen’s hen (I will die on the hill that she deserved a name) spends a long, patient stretch of the film laying eggs that Giorgio keeps coming in and collecting. She fights him for them, she tries to follow where he takes them, and eventually she starts laying in increasingly creative hiding spots around the property, convinced one of them might actually get left alone long enough to hatch. She leaves them under a kid’s bed, in the rafters, wherever she can manage. It’s that obsession, not one single egg she’s been protecting the whole runtime, that eventually leads her somewhere far darker than I expected.
What I did not see until it was already happening is that Giorgio has his own storm coming, something that has nothing to do with chickens and everything to do with the people in his life and the choices he’s made trying to keep his tavern alive. The two stories, hers and his, stop running parallel and start actually colliding. That’s the stretch where this film turned from “charming” into something I’m still thinking about.
My one real gripe, and it’s a small one is about something in the final stretch late on where I genuinely could not understand how nobody from the tavern’s patrons called the police. A restaurant full of witnesses, a violent incident, and total silence from the outside world afterward. It’s the one beat that asked more of my patience than it probably should have.
What happens from there, who Giorgio really is to the people around him, what the smugglers actually want, and how this ends for both the hen and the man who saved her, is part of the spoiler-section below, and I mean that more seriously than I usually do. This is a film you want to go into cold.
Hen is rated
4.5 Fiercely Protective Mother Hens out of 5
A Chicken’s Journey, A Human Tragedy
A hen escapes a factory farm, outruns a fox, and lands at a crumbling seaside tavern run by a man with his own troubles. Hen tells her journey with real, trained animals instead of CGI, and somehow makes a bird’s small, droll quest for motherhood carry as much weight as anything happening to the humans around her.
Where to Watch “Hen”
Hen Is Streaming On:
“Hen follows one chicken’s escape from the factory farm to a crumbling tavern, and somehow makes every bit of it matter.”
— Mother of Movies
Spoiler Section for “Hen” What Happened? Does She Die?
Mother of Movies: Spoiler Territory
What the Tavern Is Really Hiding
Proceed only if you’ve watched Hen — this one earns the full context.
Hen Trailer
Similar Titles to Hen
- Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) — Bresson’s donkey-as-witness classic, the clearest arthouse ancestor for Hen’s approach. Watch the trailer for that film here.
- Gunda (2020) — another recent film built entirely around a farm animal’s lived experience, in black and white.
- Silver S
- White God (2014) — For the same instinct to tell a human story sideways, through an animal’s eyes. This time it’s a dog called Hagen.
- Good Boy (2025) — The best horror movie ever to star a labradoor. And it will both scare and make you sad.
- Pets on a Train (2025) — Is a cartoon, not real action, but it’s about some animals trying to find their place in the world.
- Benji (1974) — a much gentler cousin, but the same “small creature navigating a big, indifferent world” shape. Everyone knows Benji.
- Kiddo (2021) — A Short film about the lives of animals on farms and an interview with the director.
Filmmaker Stamp
György Pálfi made his name with Hukkle, his 2002 debut, followed by the surreal body-horror collage Taxidermia and the genuinely experimental Final Cut, Ladies & Gentlemen, built entirely from clips of other films. His filmography since, Freefall, His Master’s Voice, and the VR project One Will, One Nation, has consistently blurred the line between fiction, documentary, and experimental form. Animals have appeared in every one of his features to date. Hen continues that thread directly, built around a philosophy, stated plainly in his own director’s notes, that animals, humans, plants and stone all carry equal weight in a story. This is exactly the structural gamble this film takes by putting a chicken’s internal life on equal footing with a man’s.
Hen
Director: György Pálfi
Date Created: 2026-09-08 15:48
4.5
