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.
Amanda Collin (from HBO TV’s Raised By Wolves) plays Ann Barbara, a runaway peasant farmer’s wife who takes refuge with Kahlen and falls in love with him, while Simon Bennebjerg has a panto-villain role of De Schinkel, a cruel, effete landowner near Kahlen’s plantation who sets out to destroy this upstart. There is black comedy of the semi-intentional kind when De Schinkel tortures a peasant in front of a crowd of aghast party guests and his factotum mutters tensely in his ear that he’s “losing the crowd”. His fiancee Edel (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is a comely Norwegian aristocrat who has the improbable hots for our rough-and-ready hero. Kahlen doggedly carries on with his agricultural work with the help of a little girl from a Tatar band of Romani travellers, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg) who is demonised for her dark skin.
Like Arcel’s 2012 film A Royal Affair, this is about the “extended regency” period of Danish history in the 18th century, something like the UK’s madness of George III. The earlier film was about the doctor who effectively ruled Denmark for a year while Christian VII was mad; The Promised Land takes place in the reign of his predecessor Frederick V who, while drunk, left things to his advisers. It’s a watchable though slightly sentimentalised story and Mikkelsen gives it seriousness and force.
• The Promised Land is released on 16 February in UK cinemas, and is out now in the US.
