Men & Chicken

It’s not uncommon to see performances in film described with an overemphasis on primacy. That’s what the Internet hype machine is for, of course: embellishing reality. See Eddie Redmayne as you’ve never seen him before in The Danish Girl. See Richard Gere as you’ve never seen him before in The Benefactor. (See Jason Statham as you’ve never seen him before in whatever the hell this is.) So it goes. In Anders Thomas Jensen’s Men & Chicken, we theoretically get to see the great Dane Mads Mikkelsen as we’ve never seen him before, though this assumes we’ve never seen him do comedy, which is as possible as it is probable.
But before Mikkelsen lectured us on the finer points of clay roasting, before he tortured James Bond, before he knocked off Gestapo agents, and before he joined a group of Crusaders on an ill-advised quest to find the Holy Land, he starred in minor comedies like Adam’s Apples and Flickering Lights, a pair of movies that, by chance, were also directed by Jensen. So Men & Chicken brings director and star full circle, treading comic grounds they’ve traversed together in years past. The film isn’t new for them, but it’s probably new for many of Mikkelsen’s latter day fans, and besides: Its restrained weirdness and dolorous tone make an unexpectedly potent stage for courting laughs.
Those laughs are the kind that are liable to catch in a person’s throat. Men & Chicken isn’t quite anti-comedy, à la Entertainment, and you won’t feel bad for allowing yourself to chuckle or giggle or guffaw at the film’s uneasy punchlines. You will, however, feel an urgent need to take a shower when it’s all over. The film tends toward the visceral on an interior rather than surface basis more often than not, and that’s a mercy: Jensen’s gut-level disquietudes are effectively nauseating without being made literal by his lens. This is a case where what is implied is often more disturbing than what is actually seen, and where we howl through our discomfort.
Men & Chicken is about Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Mikkelsen), a sibling duo who discover, after the death of their elderly father, that they are adopted. Shocking. More shocking still: They have the same dad, but different mothers. Gabriel determines to seek out their sire, a geneticist who dedicated his career to stem cell research, and begrudgingly brings along the unruly and forcible Elias. Their journey takes them to a sparsely populated island forgotten by time, whereupon they find that they have three half brothers—Josef (Nicolas Bro), Gregor (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), and Franz (Søren Malling)—who share dominion of the crumbling manse they call home with free-range livestock. They favor beatings as a response to uninvited guests and personal disputes alike. To call them uncivilized would be an understatement.