Terribly Happy

Here's a weird one. Imagine if the Coen Brothers had directed Hot Fuzz, minus the action sequences. What you'd get is the Danish import Terribly Happy. This movie has so much atmosphere, I got a headache watching it. It stars Jakob Cedergren as Robert Hansen, a Copenhagen cop banished to a small town after an "incident." He arrives there and takes the position of Police Marshall, and quickly finds nothing much to do.

The small town is apparently bankrupt. Very few people are around, and those that are spend most of their time in the pub. A little girl occasionally walks by pushing a baby carriage very much in need of oiling. When Hansen gets a flat tire on his bike, he takes it to the bike shop only to find that the proprietor has gone missing. "That happens here a lot," a lady tells him.

The town is surrounded on all sides by endless prairies. There is a bog on the edge of town. The town's grievances are often carried out at the bog, hence the "missing people." It's that kind of movie.

I thought I was getting into David Lynch territory there for a second, but once Terribly Happy gets going, it becomes a richly atmosphere film noir about a cop cut off from the big city and his wife and daughter, and left to deal with some screws loose hicks. The town's doctor is a morphine addict. The town slut takes to Hansen almost immediately. And then there is the slut's abusive husband, a rather unwholesome character named Jorgen, played with all stops out by Kim Bodnia, who I haven't seen since the original Nightwatch (The morgue movie, not the vampire one.).

The main plot centers on Hansen trying to straighten out the situation between Jorgen and his wife, whose daughter is the girl with the squeaky baby carriage. A lot of the twists and turns are fairly predictable, if well executed, and the actors are completely engaging. It's later in the film that a twist occurs that I saw coming, but that should throw you for a loop anyway because of what happens afterwards. Hansen goes from a mysterious, not entirely innocent protagonist to a slippery, conniving anti-hero in a snap, and it only gets worse from there, as Hansen's background, and details of the "incident" come to light.

Not much more can be said without giving away the twists and turns, but what I can talk about a couple of the film's more humorous moments. There is a particularly hilarious scene that comes out of nowhere where Hansen and Jorgen have a drink-off in the bar, each consuming beer after beer and shot after shot in a matter of seconds until they are stumbling drunk, all the while staring each other down. It's the funniest display of machismo since the scene in Predator where all the guys line up and fire their guns at the jungle. There are a lot of scenes like this in Terribly Happy that play on the cliches of a small hick town, especially one with its own catch phrase, "mojn" (pronounced like "coin" with an "m"), which means both hello and goodbye. Since it's the only custom Hansen is aware of, he overuses it in order to fit in. This gets a big laugh later when a cat says hello back to him.

Hot Fuzz had machine guns going off all over the place, and blood and guts coating the camera. Terribly Happy works on a more subtle level, as evidenced in the only scene where a gun is fired. The sound made me jump, that's how quiet the movie is. Once again proving that less is more, a single gunshot in Terribly Happy did the same thing most movies use an entire explosion to accomplish.