In its opening moments, there’s something of early Werner Herzog about The Promised Land (Bastarden), writer-director Nikolaj Arcel’s retelling of a true-life act of monumental masculine hubris in the face of impossible odds. Yet the story is always in a struggle with itself, to explore these issues versus resolving this inner struggle with a firelit bloodbath.
Mads Mikkelsen inhabits the stiff collar and stiff manner of Captain Ludvig von Kahlen, a soldier in the Danish royal army during the reign of King Frederik V. In 1755, von Kahlen declared to the king’s advisors that he wanted to settle Jutland heaths and prove that they were not simply habitable but could become fertile. In return, he would be granted the title of earl: an easy bet for the royal court to accept, since he exuded Fitzcarraldo levels of arrogance, and everyone knew that the heath was unfarmable. And, as history shows, they were right. His desperate attempts to get settlers to follow his lead failed like their crops, and by 1763 even von Kahlen had given up and returned to military life.
But in Arcel’s version (adapted from Ida Jessen’s 2020 novel, Kaptajnen og Ann Barbara), the enemy is not simply the environment. As he drills into the dark, dead soil, Kahlen disturbs Frederik De Schinkel (Bennebjerg), the local lord and county judge who has decided that this land is his, and so Kahlen is little more than a tenant. With two of de Schinkel’s runaway tenants in Kahlen’s employ – brutalized farmer Johannes Eriksen (Andersen) and his wife, Ann Barbara (Collin), outlaw Taters working his land – and his firm conviction that this is royal land, the captain and the noble are on an inevitable collision course.
This is all wildly ahistorical, of course, as both Arcel and Jessen are more interested in the classic “war-weary hired gun picks settlers over landlords” than the tedium of tilling barren land. Equally, Kahlen’s flirtations with Schinkel’s fiancée, Edel (Thorp), aren’t quite up there with Mel Gibson’s William Wallace having an affair with Princess Isabella of France (who, in reality, would have been three at the time), but it’s all in aid of turning Schinkel into a monster, as he responds with an act of incalculable cruelty. The real Schinkel, it seems, was more litigious than violent, but where would the fun be for Bennebjerg in that, as he plays the shrill weasel in a wig as a mix of Pirates of the Caribbean‘s preening martinet Norrington and Schindler’s List‘s vile Amon Goeth.
As a bleak and morose tale of vengeance, The Promised Land may be a little slow-moving for its own good and a little predictable, too, as Kahlen adds the local priest (Lindh) and a foulmouthed runaway waif (Hagberg) to his ramshackle proxy family. What raises it above its similarly plotted kindred is that Arcel adds an intriguing level of court intrigue and class aspiration, as von Kahlen aspires to leave his lowborn roots and Schinkel bristles every time someone leaves the honorific “de” off his name. In those complexities, and its more mordant analyses of the arbitrary mechanisms of power, The Promised Land bears impressively bitter fruit.
This article appears in February 2 • 2024.
