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CHANNEL 366: COPENHAGEN COWBOY (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Angela Bundalovic, Andreas Lykke Jørgensen, Li Ii Zhang, Jason Hendil-Forssell

PLOT: Miu, an 18-year-old girl with mysterious powers, becomes involved in the Copenhagen crime scene after being sold to a pimp’s sister as a “lucky coin.”

Still from Copenhagen Cowboy, Season 1 (2023)
Copenhagen Cowboys. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2022

COMMENTS: If any Refnheads are somehow unaware of the quiet debut of six episodes of slow, stylized, depravity from Denmark, well… you’re about to be thrilled. Refn continues the style he’s honed through Drive (2011), Only God Forgives (2013), and The Neon Demon (2016): minimalist plot development spiked with bouts of brutal violence, glowing primary color lighting, and noirish criminality, adding a stronger-than-usual dose of stylish conceptual weirdness.

Angela Bundalovic, in a performance that can only be described as “restrained,” centers the movie in an inscrutable charisma. Rail-thin and clad in baggy clothes, Miu begins as an androgynous figure, opening with a scene where a gaggle of Eastern European women take snips off of her bowl haircut for luck. (It’s surprising to learn waifish Bundalovic is actually 27-years-old; she almost looks too young to be Miu’s professed 18.) Later attempts to sexualize Miu will fail; she’s neither feminine nor masculine, but (perhaps literally) alien. Standing quietly and staring with an unreadable expression is her signature move. Circumstances will force her hand and, through clever editing and choreography, reveal her to be a deadly hand-to-hand fighter. That it’s believable that this stick of a chick could pulverize manly men in single combat is a testament to the quiet confidence she exudes. By the time a corrupt criminal lawyer who knew her from before she was sold to the brothel encounters her again, we aren’t surprised that his face betrays more than a tinge of fear. Miu is one badass lady, and season one does not approach the limits of whatever power she possesses.

“Copenhagen Cowboy” languorously makes its way through various red-and-blue-neon-lit chambers, as Miu migrates from the hellish brothel to a Chinese restaurant, with a stopover at a pig farm. The series indirectly explores immigrant experience in the EU, as nearly all the main characters, whether Eastern European or Asian, are undocumented and driven into a common underground criminal counterculture. As the series goes on, a worthy adversary for Miu emerges: a decadent, lily-white, aristocratic moneyed family. They have closets full of perversions: ritual sadism, a phallic sex cult, and strong hints of incest. Are they the indigenous Danish elite, feeding on the underclass? Perhaps, but it turns out that they, like Miu, may be alien to this world, products of witchcraft—or worse. That sounds like a lot of plot development—and we haven’t even mentioned the Chinese gang, or Miu’s brief stint as a drug dealer—but everything spreads sparely across the series’ six-hour runtime, with reveals coming in drips. And fear not, there are plenty of weird adornments to Refn’s moody backgrounds: a man who only communicates in pig squeals, a dead sister resurrected, Miu’s face flowerized.

Probably the biggest issue with the series is its incomplete nature. Episode 6, “The Heavens Will Fall,” hints at answers to Miu’s origin while leaving the actual nature of her newest occult antagonist up in the air. Refn has some pull with a small audience, and brings Netflix a niche prestige they enjoy, but his following isn’t big enough to make a second season a sure bet (about two-thirds of the streamer’s series get picked up for round two, with prospects dropping significantly for a third go). Ending “Copenhagen” on what is, by Refn standards, a cliffhanger is a gamble. It would be disappointing if we didn’t get to see where Miu’s winding path takes her next.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…so weird, it’s shocking Netflix took a risk on it… fans of the unpredictable, the bizarre, and the deviant will be delighted to see the streamer investing so heavily in the auteur’s flights of phantasmagoric fancy.”–Nick Schager, The Daily Beast (contemporaneous)

(This series was nominated for review by Parmesan74 (letterboxd). Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: SKINAMARINK (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Kyle Edward Ball

FEATURING: Dali Rose Tetreault, Lucas Paul, Ross Paul, Jamie Hill

PLOT: Young Kevin and Kaylee find themselves in the house alone late at night, hearing bumps, seeing poltergeist activity, and eventually conversing with unseen voices.

Still from Skinamarink (2022)

COMMENTS: Everything you’ve heard about Skinamarink is true. Yes, it is made up of often-silent, oddly-framed, static-fogged shots of doors, lamps, and Legos. The sparse dialogue is occasionally inaudible. Items move mysteriously and gravity is briefly reversed, but the liveliest action comes from public domain cartoons. There are no clear explanations, and some of the information we do receive is contradictory. It’s boring, and it’s mesmerizing, and it’s tedious, and it’s terrifying. Even its most ardent defenders will likely concede that, at 100 minutes, it’s unjustifiably long. It may be best conceptualized as unedited, jumbled security camera footage from a child’s nightmare.

Skinamrink defies analysis. It puts you into the point of view of a child dealing with a nighttime world that’s simultaneously familiar and strange, your mind coping with your lack of understanding by filling in details. As much as any film we’ve ever reviewed, Skinamarink invites you to create your own narrative, whether you view it as a supernatural haunting, a metaphor for abuse, or simply a feature length immersion in childhood fears. If you’re looking for clues, perhaps pay attention to the first line of clearly spoken dialogue, which occurs twelve minutes in—although even that nugget of information is capable of multiple interpretations.

I can’t unconditionally recommend Skinamrink, but I can’t deny its power, either. As with all experimental cinema, your results will vary in proportion to your disposition, your patience, and the amount of work and imagination you’re willing to put into it. I will say that, if you’re not frightened off by excessive minimalism and the idea of murky visions, whispered conversations, and twisted nostalgia for a time when you were frightened of the boogeyman and monsters under your bed appeals to you, then you should definitely seek out Skinamarink.

Skinamarink got an unlikely theatrical run for a microbudget film, generating good word of mouth, bad word of mouth, and bitter arguments among horror fans. Though falling well short of inciting a Blair Witch style audience mania, it’s safe to assume the project has more than earned back its $15,000 budget. It currently streams exclusively on Shudder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The point of view that the camera shows is, seemingly, sometimes that of one or the other of the children, but the skewing and fragmentation of perspective suggests an attempt to recover the unworldliness and incomprehension of early childhood, the fragmentary incoherence of children’s experience, even the psychoanalytic substitution of heavily cathected and weirdly dominant minor objects or visions to stand in for much more momentous ones… Yet the movie’s horrors and uncanny aspects mostly remain at the theoretical level… The images appear to be the tip of an iceberg, but there’s no iceberg beneath them.”–Richard Brody, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: MASKING THRESHOLD (2021)

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Masking Threshold is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY: Johannes Grenzfurthner

FEATURING: Voice of Ethan Haslam

PLOT: A man performs experiments in an attempt to find the source of the tinnitus that is driving him mad.

Still from Masking Threshold (2021)

COMMENTS: It’s no surprise that Masking Threshold isn’t getting a big theatrical release; it’s more of a miracle that it was able to play in a few theaters at all. This has nothing to do with the film’s quality and everything to do with its style: this is a film that is (almost) entirely narrated by the protagonist, while the camera focuses (almost) exclusively on closeups of objects for the entire runtime. A movie that plays like a paranoid podcast illustrated with a succession of moving slides—sort of a contemporary feature-length version of La Jetée—is a hard sell in any climate, but particularly at a time when movie theaters are struggling to put butts in seats.

Fortunately, the scaled-back nature of the project means it will play well on small screens (although it would be nice to hear that crucial sound mix emanating from Dolby surround-sound speakers). Despite the fact that it may only be a MacGuffin for the protagonist’s deeper psychological issues, sound—the rustle of fabric, turning of pages, test tones the protagonist generates for his own reference—-provides the texture of the film. The movie quietly ushers us into the protagonist’s mind, as we hear none of his background tinnitus in the early going, but the hum slowly and subtly creeps into the soundtrack, scarcely noticed, until by the end we hear these subtones too. These minute variations in drones, unidentifiable rustlings and buzzings, and oscillations have tremendous significance to the protagonist, but to us they remain esoteric. The movie’s production values are low, so visuals cleverly rely on extreme closeups of carbon dioxide bubbles, slices of bread, algae, ants, and mouse corpses, supplemented by various charts, graphs, alchemical prints, blinking diodes, repurposed memes, and so on. The protagonist’s face is never clearly visible. The movie is presented as a YouTube diary by one of those “independent researchers” whose peculiar-to-insane preoccupations fail to strike a chord with a mass audience; his impassioned Reddit posts leave him the subject of trolling and lols.

This is a strange movie, in that the first-person monologue script would work just as well as a short story; in a way, Masking Threshold is nothing but multimedia-enhanced prose. But that makes it a triumph; a movie literally constructed from objects found around the house or bought at Home Depot, Best Buy, and Petco, is inspirational. The protagonist is erudite (the movie is full of fascinating trivia) and arrogant; his inner monologue is profound when discussing the philosophy of science, and myopic when interpreting the results of his own experience. His narrative voice put me in mind of the antihero of ‘s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” while the madness resulting from his investigation onto cosmic phenomena evokes any number of victims. (It’s noteworthy that both authors get a “thanks” in the credits). Not to say that Grenzfurthner’s script (co-written with Samantha Lienhard) lives up to those classic influences—but it does update that psychological horror template with timely references to Internet culture, Q-Anon, and “doing your own research.”  Masking Threshold is a successful, immersive, and credible experiment in diving into one man’s particular rabbit hole universe.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…his paranoid, obsessive quest digs its own rabbit hole of increasingly unhinged weirdness, escalating from the unhygienic ick of growing algae and such to… well, if you suspect a narrative like this must inevitably lead to homicidal violence, you’d be right.”–Dennis Harvey, 48 Hills

 

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CAPSULE: RADIO ON (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Christopher Petit

FEATURING: David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer

PLOT: A disc jockey drives across the UK when he learns about his brother’s death.

Still from Radio On (1979)

COMMENTS: Radio On is well aware that its soundtrack is its strongest (or, at least, its most marketable) component. The movie begins with the sound of a radio dial quickly migrating through static and brief news snippets to fasten onto singing “Heroes” (the rare extended version where the crooner sings the lyrics in both English and German). The main cast are quickly credited, and then we launch into the soundtrack credits:  Bowie. Kraftwerk. King Crimson’s Robert Fripp. Ian Dury. A bunch of late punk/early new wave acts now forgotten. Devo. (Though not credited, a young Sting will also cameo, as a guitar-playing gas station pump jockey who sings Eddie Cochran’s “Three Steps to Heaven.”) Cinematic staple “Heroes” continues to drone as the black and white camera pans through a cluttered apartment to eventually light upon a body in a bathtub.

Unfortunately, the zeitgeist tunes and superior camerawork (by associate Martin Schäfer, one of several connections to the German director found in Radio On) are the movie’s only real draws. Made just as Thatcherism was taking hold in the U.K., Radio On is as dour and torpid as the mindset of liberal intellectuals of the period. That body in the bathtub belongs to our DJ protagonist Robert’s dead brother, who, after 25 or so minutes of dilly-dallying, staring off into space, and getting a haircut in what seems like real time, sets him off on a journey to find out what happened. The camera focuses on the ugliest examples of modern British architecture it can find—factories, tenement skyscrapers, freeway on-ramps—so that when we finally see the flat and bleak English landscape outside his car window, it looks pastoral by comparison. Newscasts blather on about crime and obscenity raids, until our expressionless antihero turns on some Kraftwerk in boredom. It’s all very esque, stylishly alienated and dispassionate. Once the journey gets afoot, Petit livens up the scenario (not a difficult task) with a few chance encounters: a Scottish army deserter, Sting, and a plot detour with a German woman (Wenders’ ex-wife Kreuzer) fruitlessly searching for the daughter her ex-husband has taken to England. Robert’s car deteriorates throughout the journey, until it ends up stalled out at a quarry by a beach. We never learn exactly what happened to the brother.

I’m sure Radio On accurately captures the mood of anomie among leftists in 1979 England. As a time capsule, it has some value beyond the soundtrack and cinematography. But the aggressively disenchanted pallor makes it a hard sell for people who weren’t there. Despite the Bowie tunes, most of the movie informed by long, ambiguous-but-sad silences.

Radio On was a surprise late 2021 release from Vinegar Syndrome (via partner label Fun City). The movie has a small but loyal British following, and among the surprising number of extras on the disc (including a Kier-La Janisse commentary track and multiple interviews with director Petit) is “Radio On (Remix),” a 24-minute experimental film composed of altered Radio On footage with a schizophrenic audio mix and lines of poetry appearing in subtitles. I’m personally much fonder of this abstract, dreamlike approach to the material, but it’s difficult to say how it would work as a standalone piece for someone with no knowledge of the feature.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an enigmatic and offbeat walk on the wild side.”–Rob Aldam, Backseat Mafia (Blu-ray)

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CAPSULE: GERRY (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Gus Van Sant

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: Two young men become lost in a desert, and wander aimlessly in search of a way out.

Still from Gerry (2002)

COMMENTS: The plot synopsis above may seem unhelpfully brief, but there’s the very real possibility that I’ve actually said too much. Describing Gerry is an almost futile task, because very little actually happens, and that’s very much the point. Even before they get lost, the two men motoring down the highway aren’t really doing anything. Their sojourn into the desert is a vague trek to see “the thing,” a goal they dispense with pretty early on. They don’t even speak for the first eight minutes of the film until Damon reminds Affleck to stick to the path, as blunt a piece of foreshadowing as one can imagine.

Gerry is largely a sensory experience. Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides capture a some truly spectacular, desolate vistas (a mélange of Death Valley and Argentina), against which Affleck and Damon seem puny and immaterial. Meanwhile, the soundscape of designer Leslie Shatz is cranked up to the maximum, with every trudge and scrape slamming into the red. It’s not just that these two men are lost and doomed. It’s that we’re right there with them.

For a story about people walking blithely into harm’s way, Gerry is unexpectedly entertaining. Affleck and Damon improvised much of their dialogue and they have a casual repartee, best exemplified by a scene where Affleck manages to get stuck atop an enormous boulder and the pair has to figure out a way to get him down. (Affleck also nails the film’s most brutal slice of gallows humor: “How do you think the hike’s going so far?”) They exude a surprising amount of personality for as little as they say, and as little as we know about them. Even their names are a mystery; they might both be called Gerry, but they also use the word as shorthand for making a dumb mistake, so the very title of the film could just be a way of busting their chops.

Van Sant marries this non-story with potent visuals that would be comically overwrought if they didn’t serve the film so well. A perfectly framed closeup of the men slogging through the desert almost resembles a horse race, until you realize each ear-splitting crunch in the dirt is leading them ever closer to nowhere at all. A long, slow dolly around Affleck, capturing his utter dejection is paired with a similar dolly looking outward, taking in the stunning scenery that is doing him in.

Gerry kicks off a sort of unofficial Gus Van Sant trilogy about young death. This film’s death-by-misfortune is followed by Last Days (suicide) and Elephant (murder). Uniting the three films is a sense that that last day of life is not momentous or weighted with significance. The days are just days. And there is beauty and terror in them, just the same.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you can imagine Dude, Where’s My Car? rewritten by Samuel Beckett, you have some idea of what this intriguing, ferociously austere, but subtly and unlocatably humorous picture feels like… Gerry requires a leap of faith and an investment of attention: but with its fascination and weird exhilaration it handsomely repays both.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motkya, who called it “ a masterpiece of minimalism” and argued “[t]his movie deserves to be in the List, if only for its uncompromising refusal to be a traditional cinematic experience.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)