This is a popular genre hybrid that I found interesting, enjoyable in the main but also slightly disturbing in its presentation of violence – violence mixed with comedy is always slightly problematic. I think this is also clearly a ‘Nordic’ film, though it should have a much wider appeal. I was surprised to discover that it has had less than 1 million admissions in Europe and most of those in Denmark. Its distribution in the UK was limited in Summer 2021 and I was glad to be able to catch it on All 4, the Channel 4 catch-up/streamer. It’s on there for another 9 days.
Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen is a leading figure in Danish film and TV. As a writer, his credits go back to Dogme films in the 1990s, a contribution to Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (UK 2006) and major films by Susanne Bier such as After the Wedding (Denmark 2006), In a Better World (Denmark 2010) and the romantic comedy Love is All You Need (Denmark 2016). Jensen’s directorial outings are much less numerous and before this one I don’t think I’d seen any. On the other hand, his scripting credits are very strong and he has assembled a fine cast for this film.
An almost unrecognisable Mads Mikkelsen has a military-style buzz cut and a grey beard. He’s a commander out in Afghanistan but he’s forced to return to Denmark to look after his teenage daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) when his wife is killed in a railway accident. The narrative actually begins with a series of random events which lead up to the train crash. One of these involves Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, another familiar Danish actor) who gives up his seat on the train to Mathilde’s mother. Otto is one of three middle-aged ‘geeks’, or more precisely ‘techies’, who don’t fit into modern-day Danish business culture. Emmenthaler (Nicholas Bro) and Lennart (Lars Brygmann) help Otto to work out an hypothesis about a possible reason why the train crash wasn’t an accident. This they then take to Markus and a vengeance mission is outlined.
In a generic sense this narrative begins to look like it will conform to the idea of powerful warrior/soldier takes on the bad guys (a motorcycle gang, ‘The Riders of Justice’). However, there is more to it than that. This is essentially a vigilante style conflict. The police are barely in evidence, but since this is a Nordic narrative, the various welfare services are – or at least they would like to be. Both Markus and Mathilde are offered psychological support services, but Markus refuses. The three eccentric ‘helpers’ are a kind of therapy substitute, each offering a different kind of help. The whole group also expands to include Mathilde’s boyfriend Sirius and a young Ukrainian rent boy they rescue as part of their ‘mission’. I began to wonder if Jensen has been watchin Kore-eda Hirokazu movies because a kind of surrogate family begins to emerge. There are two or three intense bloody battles in this narrative but the rest of the time is taken up with various discussions about coincidences, algorithms, personal fears and therapy, body issues and father-daughter relationships etc.
The performances are all very good. The music is not what you might expect in an action film and the locations tend to be in a small port town and the flatlands of outer suburbia. The town appears to be represented by shots of Odense, but not the tourist bits. The film reportedly cost around €5.3 million which was covered by Danish returns but admissions outside Denmark seem to have been limited. It doesn’t appear to have been released in France, Europe’s biggest market. 2020 to 2022 was the main period of COVID restrictions, i.e. cinema markets were slow to recover. I would expect that with ancillary earnings from physical, TV and streaming platforms and other territories outside Europe it will have been profitable in the end. As one IMDb ‘user’ has suggested, Hollywood could never make a film as stylish as this for so little money. It is dryly comic in parts but I do wish it could have had a lower body count from the action. Overall though, it is a good example of mainstream Nordic filmmaking for the ‘popular’ market.
itp Global Film 
I really enjoyed this film. I caught it first at the Prince Charles Cinema on its very limited release, and then again recently on Film4. Might have mentioned before that Nikolaj Lie Kaas is one of those selective actors who often shows up in films that I find rewarding to watch, for example the Department Q trilogy where he plays a detective sidelined to long unsolved cases with a partner who is the polar opposite. Mads Mikkelsen is indeed almost unrecognisable but serves as a serious foil to the unhinged trio who have their own theories about the death of his wife. The violence, I suppose, is occasionally shocking but more surprising perhaps is the utter failure of the authorities to get even tangentially involved. Ultimately though the film has a very soft heart which it hides with a bit of bloodshed.
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