The hunt for Gollum
2009 · 39m · Reino Unido
Directed by Chris Bouchard
Genres: action, adventure, fantasy
Aragorn hunts Gollum in the years before The Fellowship of the Ring to learn more about the One Ring, in an independent fan film set just before The Lord of the Rings.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A fan film that plays it completely straight — which would normally put me to sleep — but Bouchard's refusal to wink at the source material, to remix or deconstruct Tolkien, becomes its own kind of subversion in a landscape of ironic IP riffs.
The film positions itself squarely in the lineage of Tolkien adaptation, yet works as a deliberate interstitial text, filling narrative gaps with formal restraint; it's the kind of archival thinking that demonstrates deep curatorial literacy.
What makes this work on a shoestring is Bouchard's decision to shoot Gollum as genuinely unsettling rather than pitiable — a single performance choice that reframes the entire hunt as moral vertigo rather than adventure, and carries the whole 39 minutes on that tension alone.