It’s onerous to care a few present that doesn’t appear focused on all its finest elements — and which means it’s even more durable to care about Copenhagen Cowboy. The brand new Netflix sequence from Drive author and director Nicolas Winding Refn has all his trademark stillness, his extremely violence, and his neon-drenched units. It additionally has essentially the most attention-grabbing world his work has ever included. It’s only a disgrace the present doesn’t present it off.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Copenhagen Cowboy season 1, but you should read it anyway, because this is really the only way you might finish this show.]
Let’s get the necessary half, which the present retains hidden, out of the way in which first: Copenhagen Cowboy is about Miu, a fortunate spirit who fights individuals and offers medication — even when most of her time is simply spent staring on the digital camera in lengthy, practically static close-ups. It’s additionally a few household of vampires and the (apparently paper-thin) veil between the supernatural denizens of one other actuality and the Danish prison underworld.
In different phrases, this must be one of the thrilling exhibits ever. As an alternative, Refn appears embarrassed by the eccentricities and fantasy of his personal world. The primary two episodes of the present barely even supply a touch on the world it’s set in, letting strangeness do the work that magic may have. Miu spends the primary episode trapped in a Danish brothel that’s seemingly in the midst of nowhere, earlier than escaping within the second down a mud highway that results in a equally remoted Chinese language restaurant.
Moments like these, or when Miu appears to save lots of a stillborn child by respiration life into it, are when Copenhagen Cowboy feels prefer it’s on the verge of being one thing, something, extra attention-grabbing than its dour pilot. However, the eternally obstinate Refn steers away from the fae his sequence appears primed to achieve out to, preferring to maintain mentions of blood-drinking and psychic powers on the periphery of a narrative that principally facilities on low-level crime with no magical powers in sight.
Picture: Netflix
Picture: Netflix
This proximity to one thing really particular isn’t simply restricted to Refn’s story (which he co-wrote with Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde) both. Refn has at all times been an unbelievable composer of photos, singularly dedicated to his personal particular aesthetic, and that’s no much less true in Copenhagen Cowboy. However with each large visible swing from Refn comes the potential for a giant miss.
When he’s at his finest, Refn can flip sparse concrete rooms and clean partitions into hanging backdrops for his characters as claustrophobic close-ups keep skilled on their unmoving faces, letting the actors’ tiniest twitches play out their feelings extra clearly than phrases may. Slightly than conventional shot/reverse shot dialogue, Refn spends most of Copenhagen Cowboy panning the digital camera in a circle, choosing up a fancy mixture of staging and dialogue between characters who might spend half of their spoken strains off display because the digital camera rotates away from them. And, in fact, neon lights drench each room so utterly that it appears to eerily drip off the actors’ pores and skin.
However Refn misses about as usually as he hits in Copenhagen Cowboy — even when just a few of these hits are dwelling runs. One notably jarring instance comes as Miu enters a trance-like state, someplace between a spirit world adjoining to ours and the dirty Danish warehouse she’s assembly against the law boss in. Through the scene, Miu dances whereas neon lights shine round and previous her, elongating themselves and her limbs into refracted gentle. It’s the form of second that ought to appear to be magic. But it surely doesn’t work. As an alternative it seems to be like Refn misplaced a guess with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and was pressured to re-create the streaming service’s intro someplace in his sequence. The lights look cartoonishly pale and unnatural, and, relatively than one thing transcendent, the scene’s spell breaks, instantly turning it into an embarrassing misfire that lays naked a few of Refn’s least efficient pretensions.
However all of this solely makes the present’s true highlights extra irritating. Buried contained in the practically six hours of stillness, quietness, and sometimes goofy photos is a tremendously cool present about Netherworld creatures haunting the streets and forest of Denmark, carving paths for themselves out of the seediest elements of the world. Refn appears to wish to say that if these underworlds are already primed to soak up and exploit the items of outcasts from the human world, why ought to they scoff on the outcasts of the supernatural world? Everybody’s received one thing to supply, so why ought to a spirit in a blue tracksuit be any completely different?
However the process of digging that wonderful premise out of the present too usually feels Herculean. In sharp distinction to Refn’s earlier sequence, Too Previous to Die Younger — which suffered from related issues however usually threw itself into bursts of ardour the place actors have been allowed to go lengthy on unhinged, explicative monologues about issues like how the world may finish — Copenhagen Cowboy’s dialogue is frustratingly turgid and caught within the moment-to-moment machinations of its plot.
When the sequence lastly does let free, principally on this season’s remaining episode as spirits converge and the vampire searching them emerges, it turns into much more tough to not mourn all that wasted time and all of the hours this present spent not being even half this attention-grabbing.
None of that is to say that Refn shouldn’t have all of the static photographs and hanging photos he needs, however when there’s not any clear level or which means behind these photos, they begin to grate over the course of a six-hour season. That is much more true when the choice was the attractive Danish monster sequence he created however appears tragically bored by.
Six episodes of Copenhagen Cowboy at the moment are streaming on Netflix.
