God in the Land of Nod: A Review of The Promised Land by Hunter Prichard

In a brooding moment preceding The Promised Land’s third act, a minister kills a mosquito with a bible. Anton Eklund (Gustav Lindh) is sitting on a cottage-porch in the barren, wild Jutland moorland. He has come to assist an army captain, Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), to build a settlement. Kahlen is Cain, having retired from military life, now self-entombed on this land, driven in his middle age by temptations of wealth and nobility. The world owes him something, he seems to think. God owes him something. With a continence often rigid and grim, the Fred C. Dobbs-like passion for prosperity restricts Kahlen’s tolerance for morality.

Every object, every person has a fee. It’s not only him. Ever since they’ve come to this Land of Nod, he, and his workers – cynical, superstitious, self-egocentric, and malicious – have found themselves stuck between the villainous local magistrate Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebgerg), and the apathy of the Danish Kingdom. On the Jutland, no earthly being has their back.
Resting on the porch, Eklund is alone, one eye on the scripture, and the other on the horizon. He’s jittery and frightened, anticipating de Schinkel’s soldiers. In the hushed air, we hear the mosquito’s buzzing – then, a sudden explosion as Eklund dispatches it with The Book. That the film’s only ‘holy man’ should turn to casual malice at the slightest of terrorizations highlights the film’s thematic wrestling between Godly determination, love, acceptance, and the pagan impotency of rage and cowardice. This is carnal land, where stealing and murder are justified by the lack of God’s moral principal and rule in the hope of making the Jutland prosperous and civilized and taxable.

The God that rules over the Jutland is both patient and decisive with retribution. For much of The Promised Land’s narrative, the honorable characters struggle against the grandness of selfish, solipsistic power – they’re not yet worthy of God’s assistance. Kahlen is a resentful servant to the King, an aspiring potato-farmer, a deputy husband to the widowed Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin) and father to the orphaned Romani child, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg). He’s also a murderer (his first victim, although in self-defense, coming ten or so minutes into the film), and a stony materialist, driven by the desire for wealth and title. For much of the film, the audience will see him as reckless, mulish, and greedy. Although de Schinkel is written and acted as an affected sociopath, Kahlen has a more complex relationship with Good and Evil. That he exists as both a murderer and a compassionate “husband” and “father” (once willing to slaughter the settlement’s only goat to make a nourishing stew for a sickly Anmai Mus), is marked by the final moments, him holding Ann Barbara, and not with de Schinkel’s inevitable death.

This reunification with Ann Barbara, the final shot of the film, only comes after Kahlen gives up his noble title and abandons the land. His purpose throughout much of the film is the hunt of power. Of course, the whole project of building the settlement, thus antagonizing the petulant, sociopathic de Schinkel, is idealistic and selfish. De Schinkel is an Old Testament killer. He’s a drunk, a murderer, a rapist. He will have Ann Barbara’s husband whipped and publicly scalded to death. Later, in a fit of rage, he flings an innocent maid out of his castle window. Kahlen, though the protagonist, acts just as evil in response. Although he’s not despicable, many of the film’s honest and righteous characters are forfeited in honor of Kahlen’s land. Other characters smarten and abandon him: nomadic Romani hired to farm; later, German settlers the King sends to bolster Kahlen’s occupation. Even Anton Eklund is murdered not soon after the confrontation with the mosquito, shot through the throat without a second thought by one of de Schinkel’s men. Eklund’s death is particularly disturbing, for it’s the preacher’s earnest bravery that balances out Kahlen and Ann Barbara’s ruthlessness. Kahlen and Ann Barbara’s revenge is equally vile. Of course, it will be bolstered by the audience. In a world so brutish, bad is met with worse. It’s in the film’s final moments, during an extended coda following de Schinke’s death, that Kahlen abandons the title and settlement, and is allowed final absolution.

The absence of ethical royal rule constricts our characters’ choices as they attempt to suppress de Schinkel’s authority. On the wild and restless Jutland, Kahlen naively believes Denmark’s King has the final word. As an ex-soldier, he only understands the chain of command. Upon every interaction with de Schinkel, Kahlen returns to his belief that no matter in whatever way he’s threatened, he will have the King’s royal support. In societies where its citizens are dependent upon authoritarian rule, moral axioms are built off superficial agency and willingly broken. Those who make and enforce the rules are themselves mortal and sinful, so whoever trusts in them will be led down the same treacherous path as Kahlen and Ann Barbara. Even the King’s men who collaborate with Kahlen are cynical and double-faced, hiding behind the King’s power but reluctant to go to battle with de Schinkel. They’re perfectly willing to sacrifice Kahlen to de Schinkel – just as Ann Barbara is surrendered to the German prisons when she avenges her husband’s murder.

Upon reaching the conclusions of the eventual revenge-plot, the unpitying violence Kahlen and Ann Barbara dish out to their oppressors is marked by both animalistic rage, and divine logic. Despite the ethical messiness, everything falls back into line. De Schinkel is poisoned, castrated, and murdered. Ann Barbara is hauled away to prison. Kahlen is rescued from de Schinkel’s torture chamber and allowed back his land. Later, he will reunite with Anmai Mus and raise her into womanhood. Despite the satisfyingly ferocious end of de Schinkel’s life, the story closes with a comment on love and discipline, not with vengeance. The film jumps in time approximately ten years. Kahlen and Anmai Mus, bereaved by Ann Barbara’s imprisonment, live industrious but ultimately insignificant lives on their little settlement. But the farm is doing well and Kahlen is allowed his nobility. When Anmai Mus joins a Romani band and departs, Kahlen rescues Ann Barbara from slave labor. It’s the final moment showing the two lovers riding peacefully towards the sea that reestablishes divine ownership over the land and its people. As the characters ride off the land, they’re freed from materialistic ambition, and enter a world of good.

The Danish director Nikolaj Arcel wrote the script (based on the 2022 novel by Ida Jessen) with fellow Dane Anders Thomas Jensen, who is also a director, and their cinematic parable of Nordic conquest and colonialism gone bad is also a lash against the Nordic fetish practiced by touchstone figures in our political ecosystem. This election year, the question is not who will win, but who will be boiled alive, and who will be thrown from a window, and who will be enslaved on the Jutland of everything. This outrageous film answers some of these.