Kristian Levring is the Danish director who I still associate with the intriguing, very bizarre Dogme movie The King Is Alive, made in 2000, about a bunch of bus passengers stranded in the Namibian desert, who decide to stage their own private performance of King Lear to pass the time until help arrives. Levring’s The Salvation has something in common with it – the burning sun. It’s a gripping revenge western, starring Mads Mikkelsen as a Danish immigrant farmer in the American old west, forced to desperate action and betrayed by a cringing and cowardly townsfolk; Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the sinister villain Delarue and Eva Green is his silent sister-in-law, Madelaine. It is beautifully and meticulously shot in South African locations that have been digitally refabricated as Monument Valley. Levring manages to channel something of Sergio Leone (Mikkelsen is Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef combined), with touches of Anthony Mann and John Sturges.
Actually, it is not just pastiche; Levring appears to have set out simply to shoot a western in the familiar style and done so with great gusto. And Mikkelsen makes a great western hero. In an earlier age, this might have been his entire career.
