Nikolaj Arcel’s film premiered in Venice as Bastard, a title that chimes more harmoniously with this muscular romp’s dirty fingernails, unruly earth and hard-hearted historical toffs. Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen) is a formidable retired army captain of low birth seeking title and legitimacy by colonising the punishing, barren heath of Jutland, a wilderness characterised bywolves and frozen ground that is home to Romani people.
“The heath cannot be tamed,” warns one puffed-up nobleman.
Kahlen’s royally decreed mission carries little weight with the villainous local landowner, Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), whose despotismmakes Barry Lyndon’s Lord Bullington seem positively amiable.
De Schinkel’s cartoonish flair for bullying – including his self-important insistence on the insertion of “de” into his surname – coalesces into brutal torture sequences and increasingly unhinged lording.
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This handsome Nordic demi-western, inspired by real events and adapted from Ida Jessen’s 2020 novel, The Captain and Ann Barbara, is powered along by Mikkelsen’s rugged charisma and various rustic and maggoty scene partners, including the married runaway serfs Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin, quietly expressive) and Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen), and the self-possessed Romani orphan Anmai Mus (Hagberg Melina). The slow, tricky thaw between the splendidly isolated Kahlen and the youngster is one of the movie’s great pleasures, an antidote to the surrounding savagery.
Hubris and tubers make for potent bedfellows in Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen’s old-school, sturdily structured screenplay. Edel (Kristine Kujath Thorp), the caged-bird cousin whom De Schinkel hopes to marry, batting her eyelashes at Mikkelsen’s captain, makes for an agreeable soapy subplot in a pleasingly tactile picture.
The anti-immigrant and Romani sentiment expressed by Danes in 1755, although tinged with superstition, sounds eerily familiar. Mostly, though, The Promised Land, in common with its hero, ploughs a furrow as a rough-hewn costumed adventure.
The Promised Land opens in cinemas on Friday, February 16th
