The Promised Land (2024)

Watched 3/8/24 (VOD)

This has one of those scripts that primes a few different powder kegs early on and then keeps you enraptured by threatening to light them all movie long. It succeeds in that there is no false promise—land is settled, blood spilt, and emotional battery carried out. This one kind of has it all.

As you look out over the Danish Heath in the opening scenes of Nikolaj Arcel’s methodical, thoughtful, and simultaneously bloodthirsty 18th-Century EuroWestern, you gaze upon cold ground fleeced by a punishing layer of snow and heather—what you can’t see is the basin of soil underneath that acts as the guts of this film. It’s the force that drives Mads Mikkelsen’s Ludvig to pursue a course so treacherous and fraught with pain that his own well-examined, potent inner-demons of alienation and greed are eventually overpowered by his experiences on the Heath. It gives him the life, love, and people he needs, and he one day learns to give up on his dream that never was. It all comes earned with a screenplay that uses its words sparingly and never loses focus, mostly letting actions do the talking in the best old-fashioned way.

Mikkelsen doing Eastwood is so pitch-perfect here, narratively and in performance riding alongside Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter (a personal favorite), with the movie even including a few of the squirm-inducing action/violence sequences that made those Clint movies so memorable. There is an action scene in The Promised Land that comes out better than 90% of action we get today, shot with a cold, direct clarity and edited with maximum impact via the visceral sound effects, and certainly not skimping on the blood. You feel the violence in this.

But again, the movie would not be the entertainment piece it is without Mikkelsen. Since his launch into mainstream movies with Craig’s first Bond outing, Mads Mikkelsen has been one of the most consistently outstanding face-actors around, his eyes and mouth serving as weapons in his various roles, often with a dash or more of villainy at their core. As the conflicted hero here, the guy gives as subtly compelling a performance as you would expect, without a sliver of self-awareness—perfect. It’s nice to have Dune and this back to back this year—gives me hope that we can begin having earnest adult entertainment with throwback ‘70s-style antiheroes again…get back to the strengths of that great movie decade. We don’t always need the hero to be a hero—the power of the movie can come from the dark, layered characters and performances and the questions raised by them. Not EVERY movie needs to be like this, but it’s nice to have after they have seemingly been made less and less since franchise takeover. Loved this one for so many reasons. I could go on and on.

8.75/10