ADAM'S APPLES
Cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen, Nicolas Bro, Paprika Steen, Ali Kazim, Ole Thestrup
Director: Anders Thomas Jensen
Running time: 94 mins
Rating: R16, contains violence and offensive language
Screening: Academy
Herald Rating: * * *
Verdict: A surreal parable punctuated with violent episodes is shockingly hilarious
but empty-hearted.
A pitch-black Danish satire that mixes a Bergmanesque contest between God and the Devil with gleeful Tarantino-style violence, this is directed by the writer of Susanne Bier's excellent dramas (Open Hearts, Brothers and After the Wedding).
It's so audacious and politically incorrect that its style almost entirely obscures its essential moral rootlessness. Like How About You, also reviewed this week, it's the story of misfits learning to accept each other's humanity, but the sentimental ending feels glib and at odds with the deadpan absurdist style of what's gone before.
Thomsen is the title's Adam, a skinhead neo-Nazi sent to do community service at the rural church of pastor Ivan (Mikkelsen). He enters an oddball household including a Pakistani (Kazim) who specialises in robbing service stations, an obese alcoholic former tennis pro (Bro) and a woman (Steen) pregnant with a deformed child and looking for guidance. Ivan, however, a man whose other-cheek-turning cheerfulness verges on the psychotic, isn't much of a guide.
The film's episodes of breathtaking violence are sometimes funny because they are both unexpected and dramatically inappropriate. But if Jensen has any idea what all of this means, he isn't letting on. Occasional outbreaks of intense religious symbolism seem to prove nothing but that the film is Scandinavian.
