There are some films that wear their weirdness slightly desperately, like a novelty tie or a desk sign reading “You don’t have to be mad to work here…” These films tend to underline their wackiness with a score written in the musical equivalent of Comic Sans font. Other films – and this twisted Danish drama is one such – favour a disconcertingly deadpan approach. Anders Thomas Jensen is unnervingly matter of fact about the birthright of semi-estranged brothers Elias (Mads Mikkelsen), a dimwitted compulsive masturbator, and Gabriel (David Dencik), an intellectual with an over-pronounced gag reflex. And that approach, combined with the high quality of both the performances and the facial prosthetics, results in a darkly comic dysfunctional family drama rather than the carnival of grotesquery it could have been.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a whole array of unsavouriness on display when Elias and Gabriel track down the father and half brothers that they only recently discovered they have. The residents of an abandoned asylum filled with homemade cheese, random livestock and horrifically botched attempts at taxidermy, the half brothers Josef, Gregor and Franz hold the key to certain mysteries about Elias and Gabriel’s background. Playing out to an off-kilter waltz motif on the score, the film takes us to some very dark places indeed.
