116 min | NR | May 21, 2021 | Magnet Releasing
A man loses his wife in a train crash. Then a paranoid statistician shows up and tells him it was no accident. Markus is a trained killer with nothing left to lose, and a gang of bikers is about to find out what that costs.
Markus is a deployed soldier who comes home after his wife dies in a commuter train derailment. A statistician named Otto survived the same crash and builds a case that it was a planned assassination. He brings the math to Markus, and Markus does what soldiers do. He gathers weapons and starts killing the bikers he believes are responsible. The film presents itself as a revenge thriller and then quietly becomes a study of grief, randomness, and the human need to assign blame to a universe that does not bother to provide it.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Markus as a clenched fist. He grieves by going to war because war is the only language he speaks, and Mikkelsen lets the rage sit just under a flat, controlled surface. Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays Otto with a wounded, apologetic decency that drives the moral engine of the story. Lars Brygmann and Nicolas Bro play Lennart and Emmenthaler, two damaged data analysts who attach themselves to Markus, and they turn a pair of comic-relief eccentrics into men carrying real trauma. Andrea Heick Gadeberg plays Markus’s daughter Mathilde as the one person willing to say out loud that her father is not coping. The found family that assembles in Markus’s barn is absurd and tender at the same time.
Anders Thomas Jensen writes and directs with a control of tone that should not work and does. He stages brutal violence and deadpan comedy in the same scene and never lets one cancel the other. Jensen opens the film with a chain of small coincidences, a stolen bicycle and a missed bus, that ripples forward into catastrophe, and the editing returns to that logic so the audience starts seeing cause and effect everywhere. The script keeps asking whether the men have found a real conspiracy or simply imposed a pattern on chaos. Jensen refuses to make that question comfortable.
This is a revenge movie that distrusts revenge. The killing solves nothing, and the film knows it, but it also understands why a broken man reaches for a gun instead of a therapist. Jensen builds a story about men who cannot grieve and so they calculate, and he gives them a target because the alternative is admitting their pain has no author. The result is funny, violent, and unexpectedly moving. It earns the sentiment by making the audience work for it.