The Hermit
2014 · 23m · USA
Directed by Lena Friedrich
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Christopher Thomas Knight lived undetected in the Maine woods for 27 years, and his neighbors tell the story of the man they never knew.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 27-year hermitage should be the premise for some trippy, unreliable fever dream, but Friedrich plays it straight—which is almost perversely boring, like she's actively resisting the wildest story documentary could tell.
Friedrich's restraint is the film's achievement: she lets neighbors' testimony create the portrait rather than chasing Knight himself, situating the work in a lineage of essayistic portraiture where absence becomes form.
The decision to never show Christopher Knight—to build him entirely through the fractured, sometimes contradictory recollections of people who watched from the outside—is a single structural choice that transforms a true-crime premise into something genuinely haunting.
Reviews
For 27 years, he had camped out in the forest, surviving on meager supplies he'd burglarized from houses in the area. He endured winter temperatures of –20° F. Every morning, he watched the sun rise over the foggy valley he called home.