THE PROMISED LAND (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Promised Land, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 1, 2024

Our protagonist in The Promised Land is a cold, hard, and stubborn upstart with no name, title, or reputation of much or any significance. He wants so much more than he has and holds the belief that toil and determination will get him everything he wants. Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), the main character of co-writer/director Nikolaj Arcel's historical drama, would be a figure of considerable admiration and sympathy, except for the fact of his aforementioned personality.

The central question of Arcel's film, based on the historical fiction novel The Captain and Ann Barbara by Ida Jessen, is whether or not survival and success in this place and time, the wilderness of Denmark in the mid-18th century, require such characteristics. The answer, as with so much about human nature and behavior, is more complicated than something simple and straightforward.

What's admirable about Arcel's telling of this story, though, is the narrative and characters' simplicity and straightforward qualities. It tells a tale about grand ambitions, cruelty, the corrupting nature of climbing the ladders of the social and financial hierarchies, and how disposable human life can become in the face of these goals and ways of behaving. However, the film approaches these themes by way of a decidedly uncomplicated story.

There's our hero—a man of wholly selfish intentions who will do pretty much anything to achieve his goal. There's our villain—a twisted reflection of the protagonist who will do anything to achieve his. This is a subtle distinction between these two men, but it's fascinating to watch how that minor difference becomes the heart of a life-or-death struggle between two harsh and terrible wills. It often seems as if no one can win in this scenario, especially under the terms by which they're playing, but under those same terms, the losses are tragic and unavoidable. One of them has to change, but is that even possible under the circumstances?

It certainly doesn't appear that way for most of Kahlen's story. We meet him in a government facility for retired veterans, possessing nothing but a meager pension, some tattered clothes, and the worn-out uniform and insignia of his time with the German military. Kahlen was promoted to the rank of captain over the course of his quarter century of service, and he believes he's owed more than this pauper's existence for his drive and hard work. At this point, it's clear no one's going to give anything to him, so Kahlen will have to take it for himself.

The opportunity is the Danish king's own desire to cultivate the heath in the northern part of the country. Many have tried to build settlements and grow crops there, but nobody has. Kahlen has a secret plan, though, and the royal court is happy to give him permission to try, if only because it'll keep the monarch happy and quiet about his seemingly impossible dream. The only thing Kahlen asks for, if he manages the unlikely, is a permanent estate on the heath and noble title to go along with it. The king's advisors agree to his terms, certain he'll fail regardless of the reward.

That's the basic setup of the plot, which revolves around Kahlen's efforts—claiming a plot of land, building a farm (which he grandly dubs "King's House"), recruiting local workers, managing the daily work and digging into it himself, too. There are problems from the start, with a clan of wanderers trying to steal whatever they can, the difficulty of transporting equipment and supplies to the far reaches of the moors, and "honest" laborers being skeptical of Kahlen's apparent folly. He finds some workers, including Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen) and his wife Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), who have run away from the manor of a local noble and think they can hide in the wilderness, as well as a young girl from the wandering kinfolk named Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), who starts calling Kahlen "Li'l Pops," no matter how poorly he treats her.

The most significant obstacle, then, becomes that noble. He's Frederik De Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), who inherited his estate from his father, a man who worked almost or just as hard as Kahlen to earn his land and title. De Schinkel, who added the "de" to his surname to make it sound more aristocratic and insists everyone use the full name, has known nothing but ease and privilege. Everything he has ever wanted has come to him with no effort, and now, this low-born commoner, the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a servant, is the only thing standing in his way of claiming the entirety of the heath for himself.

It's an old, familiar conflict, and that's to the film's benefit. Arcel and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen have larger ideas to explore about human nature, what makes and breaks the notion of civilization, and whether circumstances make people who they are or some element of humanity is engrained with the need to control.

All of this, though, is baked into this tale. The landscape, presented naturally as a place of great beauty and impenetrable starkness by cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk, is a backdrop that comes to embody the contradictions and distinctions of its characters.

In Mikkelsen's performance, the film possesses a central figure who comes across as equally callous as he is, surprisingly and eventually, capable of some warmth, and the evolution of Kahlen is subtle and, as a result, quite affecting by the end of his ambitious endeavors. Meanwhile, Bennebjerg's De Schinkel becomes a most hateful and hate-worthy villain—not only because of how ruthless the man reveals himself to be (from defenestrating an innocent bystander to his anger, to boiling a prisoner alive, and to hiring prisoners to slaughter his perceived foes), but also in how the actor imbues the character with a pathetic degree of impotence.

That these two characters are so much alike at the start and through much of the ensuing standoff is a tantalizing notion. The Promised Land explores the reality and limits of that comparison by way of an old-fashioned tale, filled with complex ideas and centered on a character who must confront himself in order to determine what he actually wants.

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