No. 359 : Wild Men (2021)

 

Wild Men at the IMDb

 This subtitled Danish film was offered up to me on the BBC iPlayer and I was glad that I gave it a go. Most Scandinavian films involve murders and detective work in the dark, but this was mostly good fun and it had a strong heart.

The film opens with a large man dressed in animal skins attempting to shoot a goat with his homemade bow and arrow. He fails to nail his quarry and ends up having to settle for a toad instead, which causes him to be sick. He’s obviously a novice at the outdoor life and he soon heads to a petrol station/grocery store where his lack of money leads to him fighting with the staff and making off with a basket of shopping.

Meanwhile three more urban young men come a cropper when they hit an elk in the road and crash. There is seemingly only one survivor, and he staggers off with their large holdall of money. He soon stumbles into the path of our fur clad hero Martin, who manages to carry out some pretty decent first aid, including some stitches on a nasty leg gash.

Elsewhere the police are looking into Martin’s shop heist and into the crashed car, which now has no bodies, unless you count the elk hanging out of the front, which I do.

Two hapless policemen find the injured bagman but Martin decides to help his new friend and handcuffs the two cops together. The bagman, whose name is Musa, convinces Martin that they should head to an idyllic village where people live as Vikings did, off the land. As they set off on their quest a jaded police chief ramps up the investigation and Musa’s erstwhile colleagues set about recovering their cash. Who will achieve their goal? – and is it one that is worth having?

I quite enjoyed this film which was for the most part a gentle comedy, but one laced with a bit of gore, torture and some killings. The central theme was one of isolation and of people struggling with the modern world.

We didn’t get a lot of backstory to Martin’s plight but we know his life in the woods amounted to only ten days when we first encounter him. His seemingly long-suffering wife and his two daughters – and their rabbit! -set off from Denmark to find him in the Norwegian forests and, to be fair, she does a lot better than the cops!

The ‘tired of life’ policeman was a bit of a cliché but I liked his curmudgeonly attitude, and he got a fitting end, something akin to that of Mike in ‘Breaking Bad’. There was some commentary on immigration and the dilution of traditional values – some of it deliberate, such as the monetised Viking village and some of it less so with the drugs trade seemingly following the incomers. This slant was tempered by the Martin/Musa relationship which ended on a positive note.

I don’t think I learned much here – certainly nothing about surviving outdoors! – but it was a warm good-natured film that offered some social commentary and a few laughs along the way.

Best Bit - Viking Village Visit

W Rating 15/23