Binging on Mads Mikkelsen Films (Part 5)

Here we are fifteen films into my binge. It’s been an adventure. Mads has been adorable, a badass, well groomed, kind of grungy, altruistic, villainous, sad, more sad, and completely devastatingly sad. Did I mention sad? Because there’s a lot of it. In this installment I’m reviewing Prag, Die Tur, and Tom Merritt.

For reviews of En Kort en Lang, Bleeder, Flammen og Citronen, Blinkende Lygeter, Pusher, Nu, Valhalla Rising, Adams Aebler, Vildspor, After the Wedding, Jagten andThe Three Muskateers, head on over to my review page.

Prag

We’re back to sad films, it seems. Prag is beautifully shot. Mads plays Christoffer, a man who flies to Prague with his wife to claim the body of his estranged father. Drama happens. Yeah, basically just grab some tissues because, like Jagten, it’s just one unfortunate event after another that’ll push you to tears. The conclusion is not exactly happy, but it does put things into neat little boxes at least. It could have ended ambiguously like Jagten, but it didn’t and for that I’m grateful. My emotions have been damaged enough on this merry film adventure. I didn’t need to add to the sads even more.

One thing I’ve been finding interesting in my Mads Mikkelsen film binge is the use of languages In Jagten one of the characters primarily speaks English while Mads’ character and everyone else around her spoke Danish. They carried on conversations while speaking completely different languages. No here Mads finds himself in the Czech Republic and everyone seems to use English to communicate with one another across their own language barrier. When he encounters a woman who doesn’t speak English or Danish they have trouble communicating with words, but somehow still form a friendship with one another. Sometimes he would just speak to her in english and she’d speak Czech and neither could understand the words, but somehow they still provided comfort for one another. Perhaps this is common in European cinema, but it’s new to me and it’s very interesting to observe.

Die Tur

The plot of this film is a little hard to describe. Mads plays an artist named David who goes through a traumatic event, but then discovers a door that allows him to go back and correct it. There are, uh, complications with this. The benefit of the plot is that we do get a scene of Mads basically manhandling himself, but it doesn’t exactly end in the happiest of ways. In fact, nothing really goes smoothly at all for David. Things just keep getting more complicated and more strange. Honestly I’m hesitant to review it in much detail because going into it without any foreknowledge increases the WTF value. Mads if fabulous in this, as always, but you will quickly find yourself so distracted by the bizarre plot that you’ll, I don’t know, forget to write copious notes about his acting for your review…. for example.

This is definitely another tear jerker of a film, even with its trippy plot. David’s not a character I initially like due to his blatant infidelity and lack of quality parenting, but he very quickly became one of my favorite’s. Once again Mads can drive me to tears with just the expression in his eyes and he used them to the max in the last ten minutes.

Extra bonus: Mads has two sex scenes in this film and they are glorious.

Tom Merritt

This is another film that I didn’t choose, but chose me instead (I love it when that happens). After I posted my initial feelings on Die Tur a friend of mine listed all of the Mads films she’s seen and, damn, she put me to shame. She’s easily seen double what I’ve seen. She mentioned a bunch of other shorts he was in and found a link to one and off I went without knowing a damn thing about the film I was about to watch.

This Western is only 5 minutes long so there really isn’t any reason not to see it. Mads plays a guy who sleeps with some dudes wife, then shoots the dude. Not exactly a sympathetic character, no, and he’s rather forceful with the girl. It’s also relatively low budget compared to the other films I’ve seen, but hey, Mads is pretty and it’s short, so why not? It’s worth the 5 minutes.

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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