The Promised Land (2023) Review: A Western on Danish Soil

Is The Promised Land worth watching?

Yes. The Promised Land is a rousing, beautifully crafted period drama that plays like a classic Western relocated to the windswept Danish heath, and Mads Mikkelsen is magnificent in it. Nikolaj Arcel tells a story of ambition, cruelty and stubborn endurance with old-fashioned clarity and real emotional payoff. The reservation is that its central antagonist is almost cartoonishly villainous, which makes the moral lines a little too easy to read.

What is The Promised Land about?

The Promised Land is set in Denmark in the 1750s. Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), a proud, impoverished veteran who rose from humble origins, petitions the king’s officials for permission to cultivate the vast, barren heath of Jutland, land that everyone else considers impossible to farm. In return, he hopes for a noble title and the respect his birth has denied him.

Kahlen sets out with little more than determination, and he gathers a small, makeshift household around him, including Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), a servant who has fled a cruel master, a local pastor (Gustav Lindh) and a young girl, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), who has been shunned by the local community. His project soon puts him in the way of the region’s powerful and sadistic landowner, Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), who regards the heath as his own domain.

Arcel directed and co-wrote this Danish production, adapted from Ida Jessen’s historical novel. It is in Danish, runs 127 minutes and premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.

Mikkelsen’s quiet, stubborn force

Mikkelsen is ideally cast. Kahlen is a man of few words and fierce pride, and the actor conveys his rigid discipline, social humiliation and slowly awakening tenderness through posture and small facial shifts. He is not an especially likeable hero at first; his ambition is as much about status as survival, and the film lets that ambivalence sit.

Amanda Collin is excellent as Ann Barbara, bringing warmth, wit and hard-won resilience to a character who could have been a conventional love interest. Melina Hagberg gives Anmai Mus a fierce, spirited presence, and the unlikely family formed by these outsiders becomes the film’s emotional heart.

Frontier storytelling with Danish texture

Arcel borrows openly from the Western: the lone settler, the hostile land, the tyrannical landowner, the band of misfits. Yet the setting gives the formula fresh texture. Rasmus Videbæk’s cinematography makes the heath look both beautiful and merciless, with bleak open plains, heavy skies and rough dwellings that emphasise how close to failure the enterprise always is.

The film is also sharp about class. Kahlen’s struggle is not only against nature but against an aristocratic system that decides who is allowed to rise, and the story’s violence, when it comes, feels like the brutal enforcement of that order.

A villain without shades

The chief weakness is Schinkel. Bennebjerg plays him with gleeful menace, but the character is so sadistic and entitled that he becomes more a force of melodrama than a believable person. His cruelties push the film towards pulp at times, and the plot beats follow a familiar path. Some viewers will find the old-fashioned storytelling satisfying; others may wish for more ambiguity.

Who should watch The Promised Land?

It suits fans of historical epics, Westerns and character-driven drama, especially admirers of Mikkelsen. The film includes several scenes of brutal violence and torture, as well as some sexual content, so it is better suited to adults. At a little over two hours, it moves with a confident, steady pace.

If it appeals:

• The Hunt, Thomas Vinterberg’s drama in which Mikkelsen plays another man isolated by a hostile community.
• Seven Samurai, the classic tale of farmers and fighters standing against predatory power, whose influence on the Western runs deep.

The verdict

The Promised Land is a gripping, handsomely made historical saga that transplants the Western’s myths to 18th-century Denmark with conviction. Its villain is too broad and its story too familiar to be entirely surprising, but Mikkelsen’s commanding performance and the film’s emotional sweep make it deeply satisfying.

Rating: 4.5/5