The Promised Land sees Mads Mikkelsen back on home turf as a Nordic farmer with a chip on his shoulder
The Promised Land is based off the 2020 novel The Captain and Ann Barbara by Ida Jessen, which was inspired by the real Captain Ludvig Kahlen. (Supplied: Rialto/Henrik Ohsten Zentropa)
There are few faces in modern movies more striking than that of Mads Mikkelsen, a star whose features seem to be sculpted in liquid metal and chiselled by a mysterious, perhaps otherworldly, craftsman.
He's given shape to everything from the chilly, charismatic villain of Casino Royale to the conflicted hero of Rogue One, felt Rihanna's wrath in Bitch Better Have My Money, and even flexed his dance-floor chops in the boozy ballet of Another Round.
There's also no sight quite like Mikkelsen set against the elemental landscape of his native Scandinavia, as real Mads-heads who saw him hacking his way through vikings in Valhalla Rising — one of the most doom metal movies ever made — can attest.
The Danish actor is back on wide-screen home turf in The Promised Land, an 18th-century Nordic epic that's ripe with villainy and violence; romance and redemption.
Mikkelsen plays Ludvig Kahlen, a retired army captain with nothing to his name but a shabby uniform and a dream: to establish a farming settlement on the Jutland moorland, a barren and unforgiving region in the north of Denmark.
As the illegitimate son of a lower-class servant and a nobleman (the film's Danish title literally translates to "The Bastard"), Kahlen also has a chip on his shoulder the size of a fjord. He's hell-bent on establishing his settlement to earn the respect of the king — and the noble title he feels he's owed.
The Royal Court considers it a fool's errand. Nobody has succeeded in cultivating this unforgiving region, whose beauty is matched only by its infertility. But Kahlen has a secret weapon in the humble potato, a vegetable that's impervious to the hostility of almost any environment.
Reuniting with Mikkelsen for the first time since 2012's A Royal Affair, Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel frames this real-life historical episode as a dark fairytale at the ends of the earth, where wolves prowl the Jutland and thieving outlanders lurk in the surrounding woods.
Out on the wily, windy moors, Kahlen cobbles together a ragtag crew that includes a young pastor (Gustav Lindh) and a married couple — Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin) and Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen) — who've fled the forced labour of a nearby estate and its nasty landowner, Frederik Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg).
Schinkel — or "de Schinkel", the pompous affectation he insists on being addressed as — is the kind of villain that will have audiences hissing and jeering with relish.
Both a spoiled brat and a sadistic edgelord, he's fond of assaulting his servants, droning on about chaos, and pouring boiling water over caged prisoners. That's when he's not lusting after his cousin (Sick of Myself star Kristine Kujath Thorp), who's been forced into his company by her power-hungry father.
Naturally, he's driven mad by Kahlen's staunch determination — the opposite of his dissolute abandon — and does everything in his cruel power to drive the captain off the land and claim it for his own.
Their resulting duel is robust, extremely satisfying stuff — beautifully crafted, visually arresting and stacked with great performances across the board. It's a classic tale of unflinching determination against the odds, shot like a mythic western where the burnished vistas — from burning fields to moonlit dawns — are at once familiar and alien.
Next to the green-screen blockbusters and garishly lit streaming content of so much current cinema, it's a pleasure to be reminded of the power of location photography, to watch actors with their hands deep in the soil or exhaling visibly frosty air. You kind of forget how great this sort of thing looks.
Of course, no landscape is quite so impressive as Mikkelsen's face, whose topography has only grown deeper and more fascinating with age.
He commands the film with a performance that balances cold, necessarily ruthless killing with a steely humanity. No simple idealist, he's stubborn and distrusting, and reluctant to warm to others — at least until his burgeoning relationships with Ann Barbara and Anmai Mus (an excellent Melina Hagberg), a young Romani outcast he takes under his wing.
Their unconventional family is the moving heart of a film that builds toward a rousing and romantic conclusion, capping the kind of sweeping, old-fashioned movie we don't see enough of anymore.
It's one to see on the big screen, for sure.
The Promised Land is in cinemas now.