BLOODY MAMA
WILDLAND | Danish crime yarn makes you an offer you can’t refuse…
From a country well known for its Scandi noir, Danish drama Wildland offers something a little different. Jeanette Nordahl’s directorial debut deals with a low-level criminal family. “It’s not The Sopranos,” she says, “We don’t have a huge mansion.” Nevertheless, the claustrophobic confines of the domicile where Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her thuggish offspring reside is where a lot of this slow-burn story plays out.
“I think it was all about trying to say, ‘Can we create tension in taking all the danger inside the house?” says Nordahl. “I was trying to turn everything upside down – all the normal violence you have, let’s just put that in the periphery. I mean, the characters are not really fighting against outside enemies. They’re fighting against themselves.”
Set in the Danish countryside near Odense, the dynamic shifts when Bodil’s niece Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) comes to stay and witnesses first-hand the way her aunt rules the roost. The drama is dominated by Knudsen, following in the well-heeled footsteps of Shelley Winters (Bloody Mama), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) and Lesley Manville (Let Him Go) as the most ruthless of movie matriarchs.
Nordahl, who co-wrote the script with Ingeborg Topsøe, knew Knudsen from her time as an assistant director on Borgen, the political drama that made the Danish actress a global star. When it came to building the vampish Bodil, they worked from the outside in. “We shook hands and said, ‘How crazy can we go with her?’ We got the hair, we got the nails, we got the boobs, we got the highest heels, the tightest pants.”
Only after that did they dial back her look. As Nordahl puts it, Wildland was never about making a political statement with its female characters. “That was not what mattered to me,” she says. It was more about allowing women to take the role of the antihero. “Basically, let’s give them a lot of blind spots. And see what happens. That was something we wanted to try out.” JM
ETA | 6 AUGUST / WILDLAND OPENS IN TWO MONTHS.