There’s old-fashioned entertainment value in this tough, if faintly preposterous Nordic western, a muscular, brash and well photographed piece of work from Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, co-written with Anders Thomas Jensen. It’s adapted from the 2020 bestseller The Captain and Ann Barbara by Ida Jessen, which is itself loosely inspired by a true story from Denmark’s history about the retired 18th-century army captain turned farmer Ludwig von Kahlen.
Kahlen got royal permission to cultivate the lawless and desolate Jutland heath, a theoretically lucrative adventure which would reward only the hardiest and most fanatically committed. Mads Mikkelsen plays Kahlen with granite-faced imperturbability and the kind of silent strength that makes him a Euro Gary Cooper. This movie dreams up romantic and dramatic subplots for this fierce frontiersman – as well as some liberal views on ethnicity that probably never troubled the real-life Kahlen.
