My notes and observations (using Scott's plot point breakdown): --Hanna’s mother almost has an abortion. --Erik and Marissa deceive her; they want Hanna for the super soldier program (“To reduce the capacity for fear. For pity. Increase muscle strength. Heighten senses. Anything to make a better soldier. The perfect soldier.”) --Hanna’s mother sings to Hanna in the womb --Hanna is born --program terminated by Mirassia. Erik betrays Mirassia and saves Hanna (he fell in love with her). (The emotionless “super soldier” children, are they a reflection of Marissa? She keeps asking: why now, Erik? What did I miss? Also the script mentions in Marissa’s intro p.16-19: “She’s alone in her bed. She always is. She has no children. She’s made choices in her life and lives without looking back.” Also used in dialogue between Marissa and Hanna’s Grandma. -- Knepfler, Joanna, and Erik at the Grimm House --Erik’s choice to save Hanna or Joanna --Marissa frames Erik for Joanna’s death. --Erik and Hanna into hiding, preparing for the mission The Opening: PP. 1-6 establishing Hanna, Eric, where they live and Hanna’s training. --Hanna desires to experience music. --Erik relentlessly trains Hanna. His goal: Get Hanna ready to carry out her mission to kill Marissa so they can have a life together in the real world. Testing her – “He lunges at her. He seems intent to hurt her, more than ever before. (p.11)” ** On p. 101 – “ERIK defends, not willing to hurt her, taking a beating he feels - rightly or wrongly - he deserves.” These two are scenes play out almost exactly, except Erik is no longer a mentor; he only wants to be her father. -- She’s ready. They set the plan into motion. -- Marissa outsmarts their plan. She’s still alive. Act One end: PP. 27-33 in which Hanna escapes from incarceration, setting up the chase narrative of the second act. --Music motif throughout. -- Marissa recruits Issac to hunt down Hanna. --Hanna experiences a bonding with a family, especially Sophia. --Erik thinks his dream is happening, until he does discover that Marissa is alive. Act Two end: PP. 80-90 wherein Hanna escapes Marissa’s men, heads to Berlin, her brief respite with the hippie family gone, and her plan given away by the boy miles. --She arrives at the Grimm House, just as planned. Bad guys show up and kill Knepfler. --Erik tells Hanna the truth: he’s not her biological father; she’s “programmed” not to experience fear or pity. Bad guys show up, he stays to protect her so Hanna can get away. He’s killed by Marissa. -- Then wandering alone she meets Marissa. She tears up and confesses she’s alone, doesn’t know who she is anymore, etc. Marissa at first acts motherly, buying her food and sitting with her, but then, when Hanna breaks down and…from the script: “looks up into Marissa’s hollow face, looks for someone to understand how she feels, but Marissa is still looking past her at the TV. Hanna turns, but Marissa grabs her chin, hard, and forces it to stay…” Hanna runsaway from Marissa to the Grimm House. p. 105-117G Feels pity: “I’m sorry Mr. Grim”. Final Struggle: PP. 105-117 Hanna vs. Marissa --The scene played like a mother daughter fight to me. P. 105-117H. Hanna kills her just like the deer in the beginning. -- Hanna returns to the forest home. Wears Erik’s fur coat. *** In my view, Hanna, a soldier-child who has repressed emotions because of the tough love relationship with Erik, experiences her “horrible journey” (how it’s described on p.105-117E) and grows up, now with the ability to express those emotions. She’s more developed as a person – more civilized? To me, Erik always had deep love for Hanna; it’s just he wasn’t able to show her any until the mission was complete. Sadly he never gets to live that life with her that he wanted. Marrisa is the “super-soldier” – she can’t feel anything. Cold and calculated. “Marissa stands too, puts a few feet between him and her, not sure he might bite. She’s not scared of him, just cautious.” (dealing with Isaac when she recruits him).

As in every good fairy tale, and Hanna is a postmodern fairy tale, Hanna is a girl with two mothers: the evil stepmother (or witch or ogress) and the tragically deceased good mother. The first she must face down, and the second she must regain. In his book about male initiation called “Iron John,” Robert Bly asserts that every boy must at a critical stage move from the world of the mother to the world of the father. Some tribes even stage symbolic abductions where a young boy is snatched away from the women by the old men, who then initiate him into the world of men. The women protest oh-so-loudly until the boy is out of sight, then turn back to their campfires and share a calm cup of coffee or a pipe and some gossip. In a reversal of Bly’s norm, Hanna begins in the world of her father and must move into the world of her mother. From her father, Hanna has learned to survive the harsh external environment, but she has learned precious little about interior things: feeling, relating, and understanding. She begins to learn these from the odd family she encounters: friendship, answering questions, being *together* (even as a stowaway in the back of a VW van). And in her father’s world, her origins are hidden from her. She knows what she is supposed to do, but not why. She knows what to do, but not who she is, nor what her purpose is. These are her growth challenges in the world of the lost mother. Hanna moves back and forth between being pursuer or pursued, and it is often unclear to her which she really is. Pressing the fateful button, she invites pursuit on her own terms. But falling for the ruse of the third “mother,” the false Marissa, she runs without knowing that she has failed. Pursuing her father, thinking herself done with an evil mother, she is in fact the pursued. As a child, she still doesn’t know how the world works, just as she doesn’t know she is the product of a vicious medical experiment. But she demands answers from her father on his own chosen ground, the land of dead fairytales. As social commentary, Hanna’s predicament resembles that of recent generations of German youths: pursued by the awful mistakes of their fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers). I met a German grad student who, over 65 years after World War II, is deeply wary that the German nation can be trusted with its own army, its own defense. The legacy of Helmut Kohl is a Germany that trades away liberal democracy–and trust in a reformed electorate–in exchange for a comfortable but morally stultifying European bureaucracy that harkens back to an age predating both Nazism and American-style democracy. One cannot imagine Hanna’s generation wearing the Jordache jeans and cowboy hat that were the 1980s youth obsession on both sides of the Berlin Wall. And only Hanna, an innocent girl raised far away and in isolation, can be trusted with the weapons of defense. Interesting then that Hanna’s evil mother, and the demon she must exorcise, is American and not German. Hitler was an ardent admirer of the American eugenicist Margaret Sanger, whose cold racist ideology at least affirmed if not inspired his vicious medical experimentations. Wiegler’s cruel experiment is ironic: Hanna would be dead if it weren’t for the experiment. In this postmodern fairy tale, the wicked mother has saved the child from the good mother. Standing in the home of the good mother, Hanna knows the consoling truth: that her true mother became good, and in the end made the final sacrifice for her. Hanna has permission to fulfill her mother’s dying promise, that Wiegler would never possess her. Pursuing and pursued, Hanna runs all the way to the dilapidated Grimm park, to Germany’s origins shown as a Teutonic Disneyland gone to weeds. Amid a Disney-dominated Hollywood ethos, watching the tale of a programmed child assassin is surely a guilty pleasure. “Hanna” is the opposite of “Frozen,” and harkens to another age, another way of showing how children learn to cope with evil in others and in themselves. At the end of an old Grimm’s fairy tale, the evil stepmother, symbol of all wickedness inherited from the child’s own mother, must be burned alive in pitch, and the child must do it. Hanna, at the last, puts to death the ancient, nascent evil within herself, when she fires the shots and the screen goes red. Only then has she earned the happily-ever-after. But we have not earned the right to see it or to live it with her. Roll credits.

jem and David, thanks for your posts. Seeing as they're thick with content, I'm going to carve out more time to go through them carefully. In the meantime, it occurred to me that part of the interview I did with Seth Lochhead, who came up with the idea for Hanna, wrote it on spec, and is a credited co-writer on the project, would be good to consider in this part of the discussion. Here is an extended excerpt from that interview:

SM: I’d like to dig into Hanna and your creative instincts at work there. You mentioned you’ve read Joseph Campbell and certainly Hanna feels like a Hero’s Journey. We meet Hanna in her Old World, the remote, snowbound area where she lives with Erick, who she believes to her father. Then a Call To Adventure when she flicks the switch of the transmitter, alerting Marissa and the powers that be of her location. With her capture, escape and intersection with Sebastian and Rachel’s family, Hanna separates from her Old World and enters a New World, and so on. How conscious were you of the Hero’s Journey in crafting the story for Hanna or is the narrative structure and are the story’s themes more reflective of the Hero’s Journey in a sort of organic, innate way? SL: I’ve never read Joseph Campbell as prescriptive per se. I think he was examining certain aspects that are innate and organic to human story telling across cultures and time periods as opposed to saying, like some gurus, that he’s discovered THE way – the precise formula – to tell stories. He’s just pointing out that this, for the most part, is the way human beings, when left to their own devices, tell stories that other human beings can relate to and understand. Our lives, and the minutiae of our lives, can easily be funneled through this filter: we are born into the world, we face obstacles, grow, have mentors and enemies (some inhabiting the same person), we learn and then return to some semblance of our former lives, wiser and changed. We’re all the heroes of our own journeys – no matter how short or how long those journeys may be – and therefore it is easy for us to sympathize/empathize with the heroes in the stories we consume (it’s also easier for us to tell stories in this way, it’s a fundamental, innate structure – we “write” what we know). I feel like Campbell’s influence over me was less compelling than the influence of, say, Return of the Jedi or Bourne or Hamlet. If I had not been exposed to him, I think HANNA would’ve turned out the same way only because I put her through the filter of my own experience (as, I’m sure, Homer did with Odysseus and Lucas did with Luke). I find Campbell– and all literary criticism – to be utterly fascinating, but I always stop short of searching for formula in their words. SM: Going beyond Joseph Campbell, the story feels like a fairy tale. When asked where she comes from, Hanna replies, “The forest,” an archetypal image. Erik can be seen to be the Good Father, Marissa the Evil Stepmother. Looked at symbolically, the character Hanna would seem to fall into the shadow of Grimm’s fairy tales and figures like Little Red Riding Hood. Are you a fan of fairy tales and if so, did they have any bearing on the story as you developed it? SL: The Brothers Grimm played a huge role in a how I imagined the story and, also, how I came to understand how Hanna understood and interacted with the world. I keep talking about how I am who I am in this moment, right now, because of the experiences and influences my life has collected and I think of all human behavior in this way – fictional or otherwise. Hanna is a human and when we meet her she is the sum of her experiences and her influences and there are only a few tangible realities that she understands – her father, how to hunt, violence, the simplicity of life and death, the cold, the warmth of the sun. And then there is her imagination influenced by the abstract – her encyclopedias, her fairy tales, and the stories her father tells her. Both the tangible and the abstract play off her biology and give her the tools to survive in the present (because to survive is to understand the world, as best as you can, with what you have available, in each moment you are faced with it). I’ve always thought of HANNA as a fairy tale, something you could literally rip from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. But I did not push the influence too far, I did not let any one fairy tale inspire me, and I did not weave in any extra-textual references to fairy tales (outside, of course, of the book of fairy tales Hanna covets and the character of Knepfler aka Wilhelm Grimm). It wasn’t until Joe got involved that he began to fill the frame with fairy tale images. I’ve said this before in another interview: Joe incorporated the archetypal symbolism to the design and look of the film (and the look of the actors). He wanted to make the fairy tale literal and not leave it entirely to subtext. I think, in hindsight, it was a good choice. SM: There’s yet another way to look at Hanna and that is from a more psychological viewpoint, and for me a Jungian one. It strikes me that Hanna has all these disparate aspects of her psyche: she’s a youth who has been trained to be a killer; she’s been drilled with all this book knowledge, but is virtually an innocent when it comes to the ways of the world; she thinks she has a father, but she’s really an orphan; as she has now reached adolescence, she has a natural instinct to want to explore and live her own life, and yet she is tasked with gaining revenge against Marissa. How much did you think about Hanna from a psychological perspective and how did that inform your understanding of her character and where she needed to go in terms of her personal journey? SL: It’s all psych 101, baby. I like the idea of Jung and he and Campbell seem to be coming at things from very similar places (even if it is for different reasons), but I found a lot of his writings to be too fanciful for my tastes (he never made things tangible for me). That whole collective unconscious thing-a-ma-jig was weird (not that it wasn’t a genius idea – Wikipedia is the collective unconscious!! Jung created the internet! – it was in the explanation that he lost me). Give me E.O. Wilsons’ super-organism and then, and only then, does the collective unconscious begin to make a modicum of sense. It’s weird that Jung doesn’t work for me because there’s an existential psychologist that has had a huge influence over me – R.D. Laing – and, I believe, Jung has a great pull over his work. Jung to me is like Freud to everyone else, I’ve only been exposed to the colorful tip of his work and not the good stuff below the surface. B.F. Skinner, Pavlov, and behaviorists in general, inform a lot of what I do. They taught me that all behavior has subtext. SM: When Hanna contemplates flicking the switch on the transmitter, something she hesitates doing at first, then eventually does, what do you think is her overriding impulse compelling her to commit that act, willfully putting herself in harm’s way? SL: This was interesting sticking point for some, something that a lot of the audience seemed to push back against. I’m not sure if it was because a lot of my contemporaries have delayed adolescences (most of my friends were still living at home at 25), but it seems a lot of people couldn’t empathize with her decision (they were only looking at the micro consequences not the macro). She has a seemingly good life, she’s loved, has a warm place to sleep at night, why change? Why do any of us change? We grow bored, we begin to wonder if the grass is greener, and we feel that pull towards adventure (small and large). I get the sense from my friends that they stayed at home until they were ready to go out on their own, have a bit of money saved up, protect themselves from any potential falls and, I suppose, I understand this instinct (it’s a practical logic; why pay for things when you don’t have to? Why take risks when you’re seemingly safe?). But there’s something scary and life affirming about having to figure it out on your own, to take risks. I’m not saying it’s a common choice in the modern era, but I am saying it was Hanna’s choice. SM: The family with whom Hanna intersects creates an interesting subplot. In a way, don’t they represent what a ‘normal’ family might be, giving Hanna a chance to model that kind of life? SL: I think you’re right from an audience perspective: here’s a normal family for Hanna to interact with, this is the way things should be. But from my perspective, they’re society. Her exposure to them (to society at large) creates a level of self-consciousness Hanna has previously not experienced. Her “culture” in the forest, her “self” identity, if “self” is defined by the people around you, was a reflection of Erik’s pride (he was the only human being she could see herself reflected in). This new “self” in our world, the one defined by “normal” society, is the beginnings of something we’re all exposed to when we first enter the social environment. So it’s less a model of hope – here’s a family she can be “normal” with – and more a quiet tragedy – here is a society that looks upon her as abnormal, therefore she begins to believe she is abnormal. This group, this family, will never be able to understand and love Hanna for who she truly is and, I think, we all, to some extent, know what that feels like. SM: More particularly the teenage daughter Sophie, isn’t she a kind of Hanna in reverse: soft, urban, chatty, caught up in contemporary culture, again someone against whom Hanna can measure herself? SL: Again, this analysis is more accurate from a hyper-textual view (from the audience’s perspective). We can compare and contrast Sophie and Hanna and measure their differences (Sophie’s obsession with Hermes vs. Hanna’s obsession with rabbits). What I think is happening with them, on an inter- and intra-personal level (the micro vs. the macro of society at large) is a melding of personalities (something I think happens between two intimates, BFFs, what have you, as they fall in love). So it’s less Hanna or Sophie consciously measuring themselves against the other and more about Hanna and Sophie becoming connected through the influence each has on the other. Now, as a viewer (not as the author; this is an important distinction every writer must make once he/she releases his/her work upon the world), I see Hanna and Sophie each as the products of the worlds in which they were raised. But they’re clay and they are constantly being shaped by every new experience. Hanna shapes Sophie. Sophie shapes Hanna. Life is lived.

A lot there, I know, but when I perused David's comment and saw "fairy tale," it set off an alarm in my mind, that I had covered some of this with Seth. I'll come back later to respond to jem and David's comments. In advance of that, thanks to you both!

Interesting analysis. >> She knows what she is supposed to do, but not why. She knows what to do, but not who she is, nor what her purpose is. These are her growth challenges in the world of the lost mother. A very insightful, big psychological takeaway for me that resonates with my own experience and observation of young people in cults. >>but she has learned precious little about interior things: feeling, relating, and understanding More precisely, I would say she doesn't know what to do with her feelings, how to interpret any feeling that conflicts with the behavior she has been brain washed into performing. At that age, in her context, hers is not to question why, hers is but to do and die. She must learn to question what she has been programmed to believe, learn to trust her own feelings and intuitions.

Hi all, I haven't commented before but I thought I'd have a go. These are my thoughts on Hanna's psychological journey, from a child who accepts her father's strange parenting unquestioningly, completely isolated from other people and the real world, to somebody who recognises how dark and alien her upbringing has been and eventually rejects it. She spreads her wings and becomes an adult, but not in the way she expected. I have deliberately just broken it into stages that I observed, rather than using screenplay-theory, but I'd be interested to hear how different theories fit. WHERE HANNA STARTS: CHILDHOOD UP UNTIL SHE PRESSES THE SWITCH. Her father takes care of her by teaching her to hunt, to skin and prepare animals for food and to fight and is matter-of-fact about whether or not she's pleased him with her skills. He nurtures her a little by asking if she's hurt, but then immediately makes it into a lesson. Despite his teachings, she feels the need to ask if he really wanted her to snap his neck. She is uncertain about a fundamental human rule: one does not kill one’s father. There is contentment and enjoyment, as well as fondness (the lengths he will go to save her). But the audience knows there is some major parenting missing here. She accepts this life with no complaint except that she bangs things. So she has some anger then, displaced, unacknowledged. There is an emotional connection with her dead mother, similarly unspoken. Eventually Hanna confronts Erik for helping her, for not realising her capabilities. It becomes clear she wants more, the cabin is not enough. We understand something of her desire to grow up and spread her wings. Like parents across history, his permission to leave comes with strings attached. She can leave, but the only way is to fight Marissa to the death. Again, whatever the reason, we know this is not healthy parenting. They have a discussion about Laika, demonstrating that they’re both sad their situation can't be different. She is not angry with him. She wants to please him. He’s more like a teacher or mentor than a father, and she has lapped up all the parental crumbs he has given her, like the rare hug. He makes her feel safe and she is happy with the plan. NEXT STAGE: TRUSTS OLD LIFE/ CAN’T TRUST REAL WORLD (THOUGH IT INTRIGUES HER) Once her mission begins, Hanna follows her father’s teachings to the letter. At first, other than finding evidence that her DNA is abnormal she has no reason to doubt anything. Believing she has accomplished the mission to kill Marissa, she finds herself in the real world for the first time. A girl her age (Sophie) offers help, but Hanna initially rejects her. Something about the shy little boy intrigues her. Perhaps it reminds her of how she feels: lost and uncertain around others. She follows him. Hanna has no social skills. She gives people lists of info, which is what pleased her father. She has no awareness that this isn’t normal, until the hotel person throws her off-guard by going off-script. Then she’s thrown even more, when she finds she doesn't understand appliances, showers, TV, even doors. The next time she is offered help, to be around Sophie’s family, she accepts. She is exposed to normal family banter, but still obliviously gets her social interactions wrong, when she chimes in that her mother died of 3 bullets. Not polite conversation. In amongst all her confusion, she also begins to wonder what abnormal DNA means. NEXT STAGE: BEGINS TO DOUBT OLD LIFE AND HER FATHER – BEGINS TO TRUST REAL WORLD Hanna decides to stick with the family, and uses the skills she’s learned from her father to hitch along. When confronted by Sophie, she feels the need to ask how bad it would be if it WAS her who broke the sunroof. This seems innocuous, but it demonstrates that she really has no benchmark for right and wrong. Now when Sophie offers her a place to stay she snaps it up even with the condition she meets the boys. This forces her into physical contact on a motorbike. Remember the lack of hugs in her childhood… this is hard for her. But it’s all so exciting. The flamenco! Carried away into a kiss, she's off-guard again and turns to her old ways - listing facts. And she nearly kills the boy, again asking Sophie what to do. Her father has always been her mentor but now she doubts him, as shown by her turning to Sophie. New possibilities are opening up for her: a friend! She confides in Sophie about the DNA, tells her she needs to protect her from those who want to hurt her and Sophie gives her a friendship bracelet, a concrete symbol of the friendship. Hanna tries to join in family life, bringing rabbits for breakfast, unaware it seems strange. When she realises she’s being followed, she’s concerned for her friend and the family. She tries to save the family and doesn't understand Sophie’s reaction when she kills Razor. She’s confused. FINAL STAGE: HANNA REJECTS THE OLD WAYS, INCLUDING HER FATHER. Now Hanna hears Erik isn't her dad and really questions who she is. She confronts him. She’s angry she's been lied to, that she's a freak. Even though he's saying he saved her back then and has saved her again, she’s still angry. When he leads the baddies away, she hesitates then runs, symbolically separating herself from him. She hears her father shot and then, totally adrift and lost, accepts help from a stranger (Marissa). In so doing, she has now, beyond all doubt, given up what her father taught her. But she’s all alone, and doesn't know what to do. She has finally completed the mission, but the life that it was supposed to lead to is impossible. She doesn’t fit in and she has nobody. Hanna does the only thing she can. She goes back to the wilderness life she initially escaped. She considers recovery possible. She has come full circle, but now she is independent, able to choose a life, hopefully one that does not involve killing people.

Great breakdowns everyone. It's helped me understand the story much better, and there's much to takeaway. Thank you! Here's some stills from the movie that show some of the imagery discussed: http://film-grab.com/2014/06/02/hanna/

Again I'm done in by my schedule, will have to come back at some point this weekend because these observations are both plentiful and insightful. Real quick per MrsJingles four stage breakdown: Parallels almost precisely the metamorphosis arc we see so often in stories, the way I typify it in my teaching: Disunity Deconstruction Reconstruction Unity Much more on this when I get enough time to post. Also jem, thanks for the movie stills. Awesome visual collection.

I would be interested in MrsJingles expanding on what she means by "presses the switch".

Thank you for those thoughtful comments. I agree: Hanna learns to trust her feelings, and only then completes the mission her father trained her for, but on her own terms, not his. Still, I think he was a good dad, who could have walked away from that baby but didn't.

This was a pleasure to read. I look forward to your further thoughts. As clay, Sophie is a counter-intuitive vessel of wisdom for Hanna. How does her influence affect Hanna's actions and choices in Act III? I'm still working on that.

Really enjoyed jem's careful attentiveness to detail, PaulG's personal insights, and MrsJingle's organized exposition of the psychological journey. Great conversation so far.

Hi Paul, much as I'm tempted to invent a new theory, in which 'pressing the switch' is yet another way to refer to inciting incident or the like, in this case it is just literal! Scene 29, the page marked 15: "She approaches the metal box and FLIPS THE SWITCH before she loses her nerve." :-)

MrsJingles, Thanks for the clarification. What I found most illuminating in your post was your description of what Scott calls the Deconstruction and Reconstruction phases, the character transition from "Trusts Old Life" to "Trust Real World", that is, the changed circumstances that require commensurate changes in attitude and behavior for the character to survive, let alone prevail.