Metacritic reviews

The Troll Hunter offers high-caliber entertainment despite a low-budget production.

Enormously entertaining chiller.

Troll Hunter may be a relatively low-budget fantasy but the film looks epic in all the right sequences.

The Troll Hunter injects inventiveness, folkloric idiosyncrasy and deadpan humor into the overexploited faux-documentary trend. A generous dollop of "Jurassic Park" inspiration doesn't hurt either.

The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.

It was an effective choice to shoot these majestic creatures vérité-style, with a jittery camera, but Trollhunter, unfortunately, is such an under-imagined knockoff of The Blair Witch Project that whenever the trolls aren't on screen, it verges on tedium.

As with so many modern fantasy films, the sequences here seem designed to go viral on YouTube in a flash of coolness, not necessarily linger in the mind or heart.

As de-mythologizings go, Trollhunter has neither the wit, nor art, nor social insight to honor the legacy of George A. Romero's "Martin."

Injecting some down time to intimate a vast internal life is one thing, but needlessly approximating patches of wasted time is another, and Trollhunter's dully drawn characters suggest that the latter is closer to what André Øvredal came up with.

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.