Yesterday I posted on The Last Viking,this year’s contribution from Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen. Jensen is a master of dark comedy and he has given us six features to choose from. All of Jensen’s films are about misfits. Some are more absurd than others, and they range from the droll to the raucously hilarious.
Jensen’s films star one of my favorite actors, Mads Mikkelsen. I can’t name a more compelling and versatile screen actor working today. He has delivered some of the best performances of the past two decades in After the Wedding, The Hunt and Another Round. Beginning with his eye-bleeding Chiffre in Casino Royale, he is best known in the US for playing memorable villains in Hollywood fare like Hannibal, Fantastic Beasts The Secrets of Dumbledore and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Jensen lets Mikkelsen play with his goofy side.
One of the pleasures of Jensen’s films is that the super-cool international star Mads Mikkelsen appears in ever more goofy hairstyles. Here are examples from (left to right) Flickering Lights, The Green Butchers and The Last Viking.
As is common for auteurs, Jensen has his own repertory company – all of his films star Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro and Lars Brygmann, and the cast often includes Peter Lambert, Ole Thesrup and Jasper Ole Feit Andersen in smaller roles. Danish stars like Ulrich Thomsen, Paprika Steen, and Soren Malling pop in and out of Jensen’s work.
Jensen, who won an Oscar for a 1998 short film, co-wrote Susanne Bier’s Brothers, After the Wedding and In a Better World. Brothers (Brødre) and After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) are two of the best films of the 2000s; watch the Danish originals, not the putrid American remakes.
Enjoy the wicked wit of Anders Thomas Jensen in these films:
- Flickering Lights (2000): A gang of small time hoods steal a fortune from a dangerous crime lord. On their way out of the country, they get stuck hiding out for weeks in a decrepit house in the countryside. Bored, suffering from cabin fever and stewing about their safety, they begin fixing up the house, eventually opening a locally popular restaurant.
- The Green Butchers (2003): Two emotionally damaged butchers open their own shop together. There’s an accidental fatality in the shop, and the more deranged partner butchers the body, passing the meat off as a chicken specialty, which becomes a spectacular local success. What will they do when they deplete that carcass?
- Adam’s Apple (2005): A neo-Nazi skinhead is released from prison to a rural church’s halfway house run by a resolutely turn-the-other-cheek pastor. The ex-con finds the pastor, his fellow parolees, and female drifter all wounded from previous traumas and deluded to various degrees.
- Men & Chicken (2015): In the most absurd and transgressive of Jensen’s films, two brothers learn that their biological father is a geneticist researching stem cells. They journey off to meet him and learn about their biological mothers. They find three other biological half-brothers even more quirky than themselves and a common birth defect. Further investigation reveals the guys all result from their mad scientist dad’s horrific experimentation.
- Riders of Justice (2021): Jensen’s masterpiece, Riders of JustIce has been inadequately described as a revenge thriller and an action comedy. It is gloriously satisfying as entertainment, but the more I think about it, Riders of Justice is fundamentally character-driven and explores grief, revenge and mortality – they’re all in here. And it’s still very, very funny.
Some of Jensen’s earlier films are sometimes hard to find, but all five of these (plus The Last Viking) are currently on the major streaming platforms. Here’s the trailer for Riders of Justice.