Wild Men (Vildmænd) movie review: mild men, more like

A solitary man roams a mountainous forest. He is clad in coarse furs and carries a rough bow for hunting, an essential survival task at which he is, alas, not very good. So he descends from the wilderness to forage in… a gas-station convenience store?

It’s a bone-dry opener to the male midlife crisis Danish filmmaker Thomas Daneskov is toying with in his second feature, Wild Men, but it’s pretty much the most intriguing bit of play this deeply black comedy manages. Oh, there’s definitely stuff worth spending time with here, but this odyssey of modern manhood is far more daring in what it is attempting than it how it succeeds, or not.

The man on the mountain is Martin (Rasmus Bjerg), who has “just grown tired of everything” — by which he means his loving wife and two small daughters, and the corporate job we may presume he has: his wife thinks he’s off on a team-building retreat. He believes men are “better off alone,” though he clings pretty quickly to new company when Musa (Zaki Youssef) stumbles into his camp, injured from his car’s encounter with a moose.

Now the two men are off on a meandering exploration, both physical and philosophical, of ideas of masculinity and men’s struggle to update them for 21st-century life. Both Martin and Musa are on law-enforcement radar, so we also get a couple of cops — a lonely older widower (Bjørn Sundquist) and a younger dad (Tommy Karlsen) who’d rather be home with his kids — as seeming unspoken criticisms of Martin’s experience. There’s a surprising amount of blood and gore along the way — this is occasionally not for the squeamish — and more than a few takedowns of the hypocrisies and outright surliness inherent in some of confused notions on display here as to what constitutes appropriately manly manliness. One aside sees a man and his pregnant partner arguing about their sex life, with the guy descending into a petulant demonstration of selfishness versus altruism; the couple exit the story immediately afterward, and the bit feels more snide than enlightening. Musa ends up with the best zinger, an observation about Viking cosplay the likes of which Martin is apparently engaging in, and the unacknowledged privilege it encapsulates.

The film ends up being a roundrobin of men who don’t know what they want running into men who do know what they want, but it can’t quite make the seams meet. I suspect Wild Men, like Martin, simply cannot cope with the many conflicting theoreticals on offer. It’s all more miss than hit, though charming and bittersweetly heartfelt in its bumbling and bungling.

more films like this:
• Another Round [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US]
• A Walk in the Woods [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]