After being in the awards conversation just a few years ago with Another Round, Mads Mikkelsen is back this year with Denmark’s Oscar entry The Promised Land. A reunion with his A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel, the period epic was a selection at Venice, TIFF, Telluride, and more, and now the new trailer has arrived ahead of a February 2 release from Magnolia Pictures.
Here’s the synopsis: “In 18th century Denmark, Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen) – a proud, ambitious, but impoverished war hero — sets out to tame a vast, uninhabitable land on which seemingly nothing can grow. He seeks to start farming crops, build a colony in the name of the King, and gain a noble title for himself. This beautiful but forbidding area also happens to be under the rule of the merciless Frederik De Schinkel, a preening nobleman who realizes the threat Kahlen represents to his power. Struggling against the elements and local brigands, Kahlen is joined by a couple who have fled the clutches of the rapacious De Schinkel. As this group of misfits begins to build a small community in this inhospitable place, De Schinkel swears vengeance, and the confrontation between him and Kahlen promises to be as violent and intense as these two men.”
C.J. Prince said in his review, “After his 2012 film A Royal Affair received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, Danish writer-director Nikolaj Arcel did what probably seemed logical at the time: go to Hollywood. But like many directors before him who walked that same path, the results were less than ideal––his being 2017’s disastrous Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower. Six years later, Arcel returns to his home country and reunites with A Royal Affair star Mads Mikkelsen to make The Promised Land, a brutal, entertaining period piece and another showcase for Mikkelsen’s stone-faced magnetism.”
See the trailer below.
The Promised Land opens on February 2.