HEATH LODGER

THE PROMISED LAND Mads Mikkelsen fights the elements and dark human nature…

Mads Mikkelsen plays the 18th-century war veteran looking to start a settlement

When I read the first page of the book and it describes this guy as late 40s and hardened, I was like, “Mads, I have a role for you!”’ Re-teaming with Mads Mikkelsen a decade after A Royal Affair, Nikolaj Arcel’s pioneer epic The Promised Land finds the director vividly bringing another piece of 18th-century Danish history to the screen. Although this time, it concerns historical figures most Danes didn’t know until recently.

The film adapts Ida Jessen’s 2020 novel The Captain and Ann Barbara. As Arcel puts it to TF, ‘This was something that the author dug up from obscurity, creating a fiction around a series of events that actually happened. So, it’s not exactly a true story, but it’s inspired by the true events.’

In the film version, it’s 1755, and the impoverished Captain Ludvig von Kahlen (Mikkelsen) ends 20 years of military service with one goal in mind: conquering the Danish heath in the name of the king, a monarchy pet project that’s never succeeded due to the land’s apparent barren qualities for growing food. With no family or company beyond runaway servants he enlists, von Kahlen attempts to defeat the elements and odds on the heath, which are made more insurmountable by the merciless interference of a violent landowner (Simon Bennebjerg), who believes the area rightfully belongs to him and not the king. And Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), the landowner’s favourite servant/ plaything, happens to be one of the runaways von Kahlen’s hiding.

‘It’s not exactly a true story, but it’s inspired by true events’

NIKOLAJ ARCEL

Citing director David Lean and Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala as inspirations for the film, Arcel was excited to make an epic ‘so character-centric and so intimate in a way, even though it has that big spectacle. Whenever I drag my ass out to a [cinema], it’s still because I want the big spectacle.’ His last film, Stephen King fantasy adaptation The Dark Tower, was an apparently lessthan-harmonious attempt to do similar within the Hollywood system.

‘The biggest lesson for me from that whole thing,’ Arcel says, ‘was that talent is a really fragile thing. You do have your talent and nobody can take that from you. But if there are too many powerful voices that can push you in 50 different directions, you can lose sight of what you’re doing. I’ve decided that I would never again do a film where it wasn’t my vision.’

That vision extended to favouring story over historical accuracy, though Arcel stresses that Jessen’s source novel was itself based on years of thorough research: ‘I wasn’t that concerned, beyond slang in the language. During emotional scenes, I had to keep saying, “We’re in 1755, nobody used the word ‘fuck’ in these places!”’