Film / Hanna

"Adapt or die."

"I just missed your heart."

Hanna is an offbeat 2011 action thriller directed by Joe Wright and starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng and Martin Wuttke. The film's trippy soundtrack was composed by the The Chemical Brothers.

Hanna (Ronan) is a teenage girl brought up in the frozen wilderness of Finland with her father Erik Heller (Bana) who has been training her to be the perfect assassin. On a mission from her father, Hanna treks across Europe with the goal of killing a shadowy CIA operative, Marissa Wiegler (Blanchett), who wants to see her and Erik dead and has sent her sadistic henchman Isaacs (Hollander) after them. Hanna begins to uncover details of her past and about her true nature all the while poignantly coming to grips with a totally unfamiliar world and kicking more than the occasional ass.

Hanna, an Amazon-produced series remake, premiered in early 2019.

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Tropes include:

• Abandoned Playground:
  • Mr. Grimm lives in an abandoned theme park, Spreepark, in the Treptow-Köpenick district of Berlin, and this is where the climax happens. It was filmed on the site.
  • There is another, smaller, ran-down playground where Erik and Isaacs fight.
• The Ace: Hanna Heller, 15-year old Teen Genius assassin extraordinaire.

• Action Dad: Erik Heller, skilled former CIA agent who was the one who trained Hanna and raised her, even if he was not her biological father.
• Action Girl: Hanna, a teenage girl who knows how to kick lots of ass.

• Air-Vent Passageway: Hanna escapes the CIA's Morocco desert facility through its ventilation systems.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The script reveals that Isaacs' first name is Michael, and his henchmen are named Titch and Razor.
  • Marissa's past dealings with Erik are left up to the viewer's interpretation in the film, but the script outright states that they are both American and were married at the time of the Super-Soldier experiments.
• All Work vs. All Play: Sophie takes Hanna on a date to a Flamenco festival, where she learns to have fun for the very first time.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Rachel is pretty open-minded about what it's acceptable to talk to children about; Sophie clearly wishes she were a bit less so.
• Ambiguous Innocence: Hanna. The story questions the amount of distance between Hanna's willingness to kill, and her spiritual and emotional purity.
• Ambiguously Bi: Sophie is eager to impress one of the Spanish boys with whom she and Hanna go to a night out with, but she seems to enjoy Hanna's kiss.
• Ambiguously Gay: Hanna rejects the Spanish boy's kiss, but kisses Sophie later on. Considering her upbringing, it's not likely that sexuality is something she understands very well.
• Animal Motifs: Goes hand in hand with Fairy Tale Motifs. For example, Marissa is both The Big Bad Wolf (obsessed with her teeth, pursues a little girl, kills said girl's grandmother, emerges from a wolf's maw in the climax) and the Cunning Vixen (red-headed, crafty and mendacious).
• Anyone Can Die: By the end of the film, nearly everyone except Hanna is dead.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Sophie, jumping from one topic to the next mid-sentence.
• Badass Adorable: Think of Jason Bourne in the body of a 16 year old blonde girl. Hanna is cute as a button, and she'll floor you with no trouble at all.
• Badass Bookworm: Hanna with her assassin training and encyclopaedic knowledge.
• Badass Family: Erik and Hanna are trained assassins and father and daughter, although they're not actually blood-related.
• Berserk Button: Marissa not having children seems to be a sore spot for her.
• Big Bad: Marissa is both the target of Erik and Hanna and the threat they face.
• Bittersweet Ending: Hanna is free to live a normal life at last, but everyone she loves is either dead or left to an ambiguous fate.
• Body Double: Marissa sends one in to meet with Hanna rather than go near her herself.
• Bookends: "I just missed your heart," followed by a gunshot and a cut to the title.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: Sophie's parents, Rachel and Sebastian, seem to be upper-middle class in terms of socioeconomics, especially the former.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Sophie is bratty, boy-crazy and self-centered. At first.
• Brutal Honesty: In the sense of lacking tact rather than being nice. When asked how her mother died, Hanna bluntly responds that she was shot three times.
• Call to Adventure: Hanna believes she's "ready" for the world. When Erik agrees, he gives her a radio transponder that will reveal their position to the CIA (specifically, Marissa) if she chooses to switch it on.
• Camp Straight: Isaacs' sexuality is pretty ambiguous given the back-alley prostitution club he runs, but he's definitely very camp.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The camera focused on Wiegler's shoes more than strictly necessary, but it's still surprising that they cause her to trip and fall to her death.
• Child Soldiers: Hanna turns out to be the result of a CIA experiment to create them.
• Climbing Climax: The climax involves Hanna and Marissa having to climb through the abandoned amusement park where Mr. Grimm lived.
• Color Motif: Blue and gray for Hanna, green for Marissa, and pink for Sophie.
• Combat Parkour: Hanna's fighting style, using Le Parkour to confuse and separate her enemies, her agility to dodge their stronger blows and her Tyke Bomb Training from Hell to exploit any opening instinctively.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Hanna, who was taught from toddlerhood how to spill blood and snap necks.
• Container Maze: Features a particularly epic chase scene through one of these. Word of God says the setting was chosen because the stacks of containers were reminiscent of the building blocks of some gigantic child.
• Contrived Coincidence: This is how Hanna finds her medical files; and accidentally stumbled upon Sophie once, twice, three times throughout the film.
• Creepy Child:
  • Hanna is incredibly sweet, innocent and soft-spoken...and will shoot a soldier in the face without hesitation.
  • Miles, Sophie's little brother, takes a lot of pictures but doesn't talk much.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Hanna's assassin training. It's the only thing Erik taught her, which proves to be a huge weakness.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Issacs and his henchman hang Mr. Grimm by the ankles and use him for target practise with a makeshift bow.
• Cursed with Awesome: Hanna's training. She's probably the greatest assassin of all time, but it's the only thing she knows how to do.

• Death by Falling Over: Marissa. Although it was the bullet to the heart that finished her off, slipping and falling down the slide (while having already lost a lot of blood from an arrow to the hip) played a significant role in her downfall.
• Depraved Bisexual: Isaacs runs a back-alley prostitution club that caters to extreme sexual tastes.
• The Dragon: Isaacs, as Marissa's enforcer in chief.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Hanna goes through hell so she can finally be left alone. At the end, she tries to turn her back on Marissa and walk away because she's sick of the bloodshed, but Marissa makes it clear that she won't let this end until one of them is dead.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Moroccan facility Hanna is brought in is an underground bunker complex with tunnels and huge air vent systems.
• Emotionless Girl: Hanna rarely displays emotions.

• Even Evil Has Standards: Isaac's skinhead mooks are Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: By the end of the movie, Hanna is probably the only named character still alive (five characters if Sophie and her family were left alive, since whether or not they were killed is up to debate), and how long that's true depends on how bad the gunshot wound was. The alternate ending (which, in all honesty, really just adds to the movie's ending rather than change it) shows that she (and Sophie's family) does survive however.

• Evil Redhead: Marissa is a ruthless Senior Officer of the CIA who hires sadistic goons and doesn't mind ordering the death of an entire innocent family .
• Fairy Tale Motifs: All over the place. For instance, Marissa is equated with the Big Bad Wolf, coming out of the mouth of one at the Spreepark.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Erik's training means Hanna can take down a reindeer or a squad of goons, he drills her on several languages and reads the encyclopaedia to her. But things like music and fiction are off-message, and Hanna only reads a book of fairy tales. He purposefully withholds direct affection and emotion and anything else that could be a distraction from her training, which proves to be a weakness for her when she enters the world. In fact, part of the story is about her discovering feelings and human experiences after being deprived of them her whole life.
• Fighting in the Playground: Erik's fight with Isaacs and his henchmen happens in a playground with Erik using the equipment to help take them out.
• First Kiss: Hanna backs out of one with the Spanish boy, but she kisses Sophie later on.
• Foil: Sophie's carefree enthusiasm to Hanna's ultra-serious and disciplined personality.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: An interpretation of the movie, thanks to the numerous fairy-tale Shout Outs.
• A Friend in Need: Hanna saves Sophie from one of Isaacs' men. Sophie returns the favor by not telling Marissa anything about her whereabouts.

• Gone Horribly Right: The Super-Soldier experiment. Hanna turned out just as it was planned. Too bad the project was shut down and now they have to fight her.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Used several times, particularly when Marissa shoots Hanna's grandmother and when Erik impales Isaacs, probably to keep the PG-13 rating. Still, it's pretty intense.
• Granola Girl: Rachel seems to be this, what with her lectures about not wearing make-up and her general hippie tendencies.
• Grimmification: Kind of. The movie can be interpreted as a fractured modern fairy-tale that plays the horror in its sources for all its worth. Fittingly, Hanna owns a copy of Grimm's fables, and an abandoned Grimm-themed amusement park (Spreepark) is featured heavily in the third act, watched over by a man named Knepfler Grimm.
• Hates Being Touched: Implied with Hanna, given her reaction to the Spanish boy, although it owes more to her training than to outright sensitivity.
• Hidden Depths: Hanna comes off as cold and disconnected on the outside, but experiences very strong emotions and a deep sense of wonder.

• Hoist by His Own Petard: At the end of the film, Marissa is killed with her own Walther PP by Hanna.
• I Am Not Your Father: Erik eventually reveals to Hanna that he's actually not her biological father. It seemed to genuinely pain him to admit it.
• Idiot Ball: Riding along in Sophie's family's camper van, Hanna notices that they are being tailed, presumably by people wishing to hunt her down. She says nothing about this, even when Sophie's mother stops to read the map. It's possible that she didn't want to alarm the family by telling them.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Hanna realizes this after her time with Sophie and discovering the circumstances of her birth and upbringing.
• I Miss Mom: Hanna keeps a photo of her dead mother by her bedside.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The fate of Isaacs, although we don't really see it (see Gory Discretion Shot).

• Improvised Weapon: Need an instant bow to shoot your arrow? Why not a bungee cord?
• Incredibly Obvious Tail: Even if it weren't Hanna they were following, Marissa's henchmen blow any attempt at stealth by spending hours directly tailing the vehicle she's in. They only get to spend that long because the oblivious family they're tailing has no idea what's going on.
• Indy Hat Roll: Hanna escapes a compartment of the CIA holding facility by rolling under its closing door.
• Informed Ability: Isaacs is introduced as a super badass killer even Marissa respects, but we see him only kill a defenseless old Moroccan guy, threaten a defenseless family and whistle ominously; as soon as he's squared off against a skilled opponent (Erik) he goes down much easier than his own goons just did.
• Internalized Categorism: After learning of her Super-Soldier origins, Hanna brands herself as a freak. Erik assures her she is not and that he loves her no matter what.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Isaacs' leitmotif (The Devil is in the Details) sounds like this.
• Jump Scare: Hanna opens the curtains to a window and we see Marissa's eye. Complete with Scare Chord.
• Kick the Dog: Marissa kills Hanna’s grandmother even though by that that point there wasn’t any reason to: it would’ve been much more prudent to just set a watch on her in case Hanna arrived there later.

• Last of Her Kind: Hanna is the sole survivor of a super soldier program terminated by Marissa.
• Leave No Witnesses: Isaacs is fond of torturing and killing the people he interrogates. Whether or not Marissa let Sophie and her family go free is left up in the air.
• Le Parkour: Hanna does a little bit of parkour in the shipping-container scene.
• Leitmotif: Isaacs' theme, "The Devil is in the Details", first heard in the club, then later with Isaacs whistling. Hanna also gets her own theme, aptly titled "Hanna's theme."
• Literal Metaphor: Done unintentionally by Marissa. When her superior wants her to stand down, she refuses, saying "No, I am inches...". She doesn't realize how true that is.
• Little Miss Badass: Due to her genetic modification and intense training under Erik, Hanna is a tough-whip smart teenage girl who's very capable of defeating even much more experienced adults using her combat skills.
• Malicious Slander: During their interrogation, Marissa tells Sophie's family that Hanna's father murdered her mother.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Sophie seems to play this role for Hanna, exposing her to fun experiences for the first time in her life and forcing her to bring out her emotions.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Hanna's abilities are deliberately ambiguous; she never does anything that would be clearly impossible for a girl her size, so how much of her deadliness is due to genetic engineering and how much is due to her Training from Hell is left unclear.
• Meaningful Echo: Hanna's "I just missed your heart." First said to a reindeer she hunts and kills at the beginning of the film, then said to Marissa when she kills her at the end of the film.
• Messy Hair: Hanna lets her hair grow free.
• Militaries Are Useless: “A loose operative is likely to be in the house. Let’s send only two people in and wait outside.” Or: “A prisoner has escaped! Let’s just get all together and run uselessly in the same direction.”
• The "Mom" Voice: Towards the end of the film, as she realizes that Hanna isn't going to come back to her just because she asks her to, Marissa actually resorts to using a mom voice with her.
  "Hanna! Don't walk away from me, young lady!"
• Motor Mouth: Sophie just can't stop talking.
• Muggle Best Friend: Sophie, the average teen girl compared to a genetically engineered killing machine like Hanna.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Hanna is wiry to say the least, but has no trouble overpowering grown men.
• Mutual Kill: By the film's end, subverted in that Hanna survives while Marissa was mortally wounded.
• Mysterious Past: Marissa and Erik. Why they hate each other is up to interpretation, but what is known is that they worked together in the Super-Soldier program that created Hanna, and were possibly romantically involved with each other, up until Marissa terminated the other children.
• Naïve Newcomer: The film is about Hanna discovering the world for the first time.
• Neat Freak: Marissa has an obsession with brushing her teeth; she's introduced doing so, and is later shown brushing them with an electric toothbrush, to the point of drawing blood.
• Neck Snap:
  • Hanna uses a rare from-the-front version to kill the false Marissa.
  • Erik delivers a pretty brutal one to Isaacs' hitman by slamming him down against one of the metal rungs on a playground structure.
• Nerves of Steel: Hanna is never fazed, even when she's in danger.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: Marissa kills Erik before he gets to reconcile with Hanna.
• No Peripheral Vision: None of the drivers notice the open manhole right in front of them.
• No Social Skills: Hanna never had the chance to grow up in society, as the only person she ever saw in her life before age 16 was Erik.
• Not-So-Innocent Whistle: Isaacs has a particularly creepy one.
• Obi-Wan Moment: Erik, just before Marissa shoots him:
  Marissa: Why now, Erik?
  Erik: Kids grow up.
• Odd Friendship: The quiet, stoic and socially awkward Hanna befriends the bratty and superficial Spohie.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • Hanna's first kills. When the CIA surrounds Erik's cabin, we see three soldiers enter the cabin. Later, we see them on the floor, necks snapped, with Hanna perched innocently on the landing.
  • Eriks fights and kills a policeman when he arrives at Denmark. Moments after swimming for several hours straight across the North Sea.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: The Sandman.
• Omniglot: Hanna is incredibly adept at foreign languages.
• The Oner:
  • Uses a lot of long, wide shots. A particularly impressive one is the subway scene, going from a long walk to an expertly choreographed brawl with a handful of mooks.
  • The chase scene in the Container Maze is this up until we see Sophie.
• One-Word Title: As a Protagonist Title
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • Hanna's German accent varies in thickness, which is funny considering that when she actually does speak German, her pronunciation sounds heavily off, as any native speaker will immediately recognize. It's worth noting that it's not entirely certain what Hanna's first language is supposed to be.
  • Australian Cate Blanchett dons a Southern accent. It's not entirely convincing, although the character is implied to be German.
  • Also in-universe, Hanna and Erik's accents show up even when they're speaking foreign languages.
• Orbital Shot:
  • There's one in a scene where Hanna is running through some large, wide, circular tunnels.
  • Done a little bit in The Oner subway fight scene.
• Papa Wolf: Erik, once he catches up with Hanna, does everything he can to protect her.

• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Hanna is the size of your average teenage girl, and she's a killing machine.
• Posthumous Character: Johanna Zadek, Hanna's mother, is long dead before the events of the film, but is still brought up constantly by several characters.
• Precision F-Strike: When Marissa first hears Erik has resurfaced, she tries to play it off casually ("I think I remember him"), but when she's alone immediately afterwards, she says to herself, "Fuck, Erik."
• Precocious Crush: Sophie's little brother Miles has a crush on Hanna.
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Sophie likes to go around barefoot. Ironically, she complains she got a toenail fungus infection at one point.
• Properly Paranoid: Marissa through and through, right down to her Body Double.
• Protagonist Title
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Sophie and Hanna develop a very intense friendship that appears romantic, to the point that they even have a kiss, Hanna's first (considering Hanna's upbringing, it's not likely that she saw anything sexual in it, but Sophie doesn't seem to mind).

• The Quiet One: Hanna in social situations prefers to be silent.
• Raised by Wolves: Erik might have taught Hanna to be a brutal fighter, drilled the encyclopedia and several languages into her, but basic human interaction is a bit beyond her. Hanna's time with Sophie's family particularly emphasizes this, her First Kiss being an excellent example.
• Redemption Equals Death: After being the "recruiter" of the super-soldier experiment, Erik dedicates the last fourteen years of his life ensuring that Hanna will have the strength to survive, even attempting to give her a good (albeit incomplete) academic education. After Hanna learns the truth about him, he draws everyone's attention so she can get away. Just as he dispatches the hitmen, Marissa finally catches up with him and kills him.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Sophie and Hanna, lampshaded in that Sophie wears pink and Hanna wears blue in many of their scenes together.
• Red Shirt Army: Refreshingly scarce. There are a few Red Shirt deaths, but not as much as you might expect in an action movie.
• Reluctant Warrior: By the end of the film, Hanna has no desire to fight anymore, realizing that she was selfishly forced into a lifestyle that she had no say in.

• Revenge Before Reason: Marissa seems to be more driven towards revenge against Erik for refusing to terminate the super soldier program when he saved Hanna, plus the undertone of them apparently having been a romantic couple before the end of the program. She even states explicitly that she wants to be the last person Erik sees.
• Rule of Symbolism: In the context of a modern thriller, the film features some fairly unbelievable situations and locations, but they serve the film well, giving it its signature otherworldly feel.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Hanna is a total badass, but socially inept and new to the world. This is particularly noticeable in the scene in the Moroccan hotel when she is overwhelmed by the sensory input from all of the electric gadgets around.
• Scenery Porn: Some striking unspoiled landscapes here.
• Scenery Gorn: The scenes in Berlin shows all the worst parts of the city: the slums, the abandoned amusement park.
• Scenery Porn: There are beautiful shots of a frozen lake in Finland and the deserts of Morocco. There's also the decaying Spreepark in Berlin.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: Saoirse Ronan is about to shoot you with an arrow.
• Sensory Overload: Hanna has had virtually no interaction with modern technology. You can imagine the panic when she finds herself surrounded by a boiling electrical kettle, a loud TV, a humming ceiling fan and the buzz of flickering florescent lights. It really doesn't help that some military helicopters are seen on TV, considering the CIA raided her house with helecopters.
• Ship Tease: Hanna and Sophie. It's the strongest connection Hanna makes. They're seen holding hands. Also, they kiss, though the commentary suggests that Hanna sees a kiss as a sign of love, not sex. Sophie is also still willing to lie for her even after she sees Hanna brutally beat people. And then there's the fact that Sophie's first thought upon meeting Hanna again was 'I might like to be a lesbian.'
• Shown Their Work: When fleeing from the Galinka facility, Erik and Johanna are driving a Polish car (Polonez), which was heavily in use during the 1990s. It even spots a period-accurate registration plates from the area close to German border.
• Shrinking Violet:
  • Hanna to the extreme, due to having no human contact her whole life except for Erik.
  • Sophie's brother Miles is pretty shy, probably owing to his Precocious Crush on Hanna.
• Skilled, but Naive: Hanna: an expert assassin who speaks every major language and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge on the world, who was taught nothing about social interaction.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Uniquely for an action film, it leans towards idealism. Hanna even tells Marissa at the end that she doesn't want to hurt anybody anymore.
• Smug Snake: Marissa shows just enough insecurity and vulnerability to be this.
• Spit Take: Sebastian has one of these when Hanna joins them for dinner:
  Rachel: What did your mother die of, Hanna?
  Hanna: [deadpan] Three bullets.
  Sebastian: [spit take]
• Spy Speak: Hanna's postcard to Erik, which simply says "the witch is dead".
• Swiss-Cheese Security: There is only one door between the captive and her freedom — no additional blocked checkpoints, doors, or gates between her and the convenient Air-Vent Passageway.
• The Stoic: Hanna is nigh-emotionless and rarely stresses out.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Hanna is genuinely sweet and kindhearted, but is accustomed to being distant and keeping to herself.
• Super-Soldier: Hanna is the sole survivor from one of these programs terminated by Marissa. If you go to the viral website you can view a picture of her personnel file - apparently the CIA was growing super-soldiers for the United States Army. Whether the Army was involved, or even KNEW, is unknown - especially as any apparent Army personnel in on the project could be CIA plants (not that any Army personnel are depicted in the movie...).
• Survival Mantra: "Adapt or die. Think on my feet; even when I'm sleeping..."
• Teen Genius: Hanna has a pretty good knowledge of several languages. One might want to add the full content of her father's encyclopedias, depending on how general their content is.
• Teen Superspy: Hanna, in a sense. She was trained as such by her father, a rogue CIA agent who subjected her to Training from Hell in order to prepare her for the day when his former bosses came for them, and she's the sole survivor of a Super-Soldier program. She could easily be seen as a deconstruction, showing just how a teenage girl would get enmeshed in spy antics in real life.
• The Only One I Trust: Sophie tells Hanna that they can only be friends if they're honest with each other, forcing Hanna to put her trust in her and explain her mission.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Hanna is the unkempt tomboy to Sophie's more typically bratty girly girl.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The Body Double. She is repeatedly told to break physical contact from Hanna after being "hugged," and then she fails to heed the multiple orders to abort altogether. She's too busy trying to console a girl who needed detaining and a psych evaluation while pretending to be somebody else who was wary enough of the situation to send in a doppelganger in the first place.
  • Issacs, in his efforts to follow Hanna, literally tailgates her for several hours.

• Training from Hell: Hanna spent her childhood learning to be constantly on guard, even while sleeping, with her father springing attacks without warning.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: A given with Hanna, given how she was raised to be an emotionless killing machine far from civilization.
• Turn the Other Cheek: Unlike Erik, Hanna has no ill will towards Marissa, and by the end only wants to live in peace.

• Uncertain Doom: It is unknown what ultimately happened to Sophie and her family. They are last seen at the mercy of Isaac, a psychopath, but we don't know if he spares or kills them. A deleted epilogue would have revealed that they did in fact survive.
• Underside Ride: Hanna grabs onto the bottom of an armored vehicle from an access tunnel, clings to it, and drops off, momentum be damned.
• Undignified Death: Marissa dies after falling down a slide with an arrow in her chest. It's Hanna who walks over to her, picks up her gun, and puts her out of her misery.
• Unkempt Beauty:
  • Hanna◊.
  • Sophie's mother, Rachel is a fan of this trope in general.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: What happened to Sophie and her family after Marissa and Isaacs interrogated them is not known. The script outright shows that they survived - Hanna sends a postcard to Sophie at the end, so that's something, at least.
• What Have I Become?: Hanna begins to ask herself this by the end.
• Wicked Stepmother: Marissa, with her creepy maternal feelings towards Hanna.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Near the end, Erik distracts the bad guys to gain time for Hanna to escape.

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