For the last three years, I’ve been taking pretty meticulous notes on what movies I’ve been watching each year, and deciding a “favourite” for the year. In 2010, I watched 99 movies on Blu Ray, DVD, movie theatres, Netflix, and my first visit to the Toronto International Film Festival.

Last year my favourite film was the spooky, strange thriller “The Box,” a sci-fi thriller that looked at the ethics of personal wants and needs, wrapped up in a strange 70′s period piece that incorporated mystery and the anxieties of space travel. Yeah, all that is in the movie, which is why Richard Kelly is indeed one of our most important contemporary filmmakers, for all his faults and excesses, there’s nobody else like him.

This year, there were a few mainstream movies that were close to becoming my favourite; “Shutter Island” was dark and intense, despite revealing the film’s twist in the trailer,  ”Scott Pilgrim” realized the graphic novel perfectly and showed off the city of Toronto I know and love, and “The King’s Speech,” despite being Oscar bait, was that rare breed of film that was uplifting without being manipulative and schlocky.

So my choice for favourite movie of the year is “The Wild Hunt.” It’s a Canadian film about live action role players (LARPers), who gather together at a camp in the woods, where they live out their viking fantasies. The film follows one character’s trip up to the camp to reconnect and rescue his girlfriend, despite his reluctance to join in the game. And like you’d expect, the story gets more complicated as the LARPers lose themselves in the game, and the stakes become far more real than anyone anticipates.

The film is also so classically Canadian, as it tackles one of those traditional themes in our cinema: that of identity and heritage, and who are we apart from our parent’s traditions. It looks at the power of escapism, at how we perceive ourselves and how we wish to be. On top of all that, there’s a stark medieval visual style at work, mixing corpse-paint and Scandinavian imagery that in some ways feels uniquely Canadian in it’s synthesis. The actors are all tremendous, and the photography is beautiful and stark.

This is an amazing movie that’s fallen under the radar, but I urge you to give this a look when you can, it’s not to be missed!

Click here to watch a trailer for “The Wild Hunt” on YouTube.