MEN & CHICKEN: The MEN of Men & Chicken

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With all the chickens (goats, pigs, sheep, and other farm animals) running around in Men & Chicken, you might be wondering about the "Men" part of the title. Here's a look at a few of the actors in the film.

David Dencik (as Gabriel)
Dencik might look familiar to you. Besides being in the original Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as Janne Dahlman, he was also in the David Fincher remake in 2011 as an entirely different character, the young version of Gustav Morell. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he played Toby Esterhase. Then, in 2012, he was in A Royal Affair, starring none other than...

Mads Mikkelsen (as Elias)
Mikkelsen is now best known as the titular character of NBC's Hannibal (now on hiatus; Fannibals never give up), but he also portrayed the real-life character Johann Friedrich Struensee in A Royal Affair. Mikkelsen was Le Chiffre in Casino Royale  as well as starring as "One Eye" in Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising (in both movies his character only had one eye). One of his early acting roles was as Arne in Thomas Anders Jensen's Flickering Lights, which also features...

Nikolaj Lie Kaas (as Gregor)
In Flickering Lights, Kaas portrayed Stefan, one of the members of Torkild's crew, specifically the one who spends most of the movie eating. It's not the only time he appears in a film directed by Thomas Anders Jensen: to date, he's been in all four of the features that Jensen has written and directed. He was also the "Assassin" in Ron Howard's Angels & Demons. In 2012, he played Mathias Borch in The Killing, a TV series (which also included David Dencik as VVS Mand), alongside...

Søren Malling (as Franz)
In The Killing, Malling was Jan Meyer, but he was ALSO in A Royal Affair with both Mikkelsen and Dencik (as Hartmann). He's been in several Danish TV shows, including The Fat and Angry, Borgen, Europamestrene, and The Left Wing Gang, but those outside of Europe might recognize him most as Karlis Liepa from Wallander. In 2012, he also appeared in A Hijacking. Another TV series in which Malling acted in is 1864, which also includes...

Nicolas Bro (as Josef)
Bro portrayed Monrad in 1864, but if you haven't seen that, you will most likely remember him as F from Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1. He was also Thomas Buch in The Killing (along with Kaas and Dencik) as well as TV series Deroute (with Malling). And, like Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, he has appeared in two films directed by Thomas Anders Jensen: Green Butchers and Adam's Apples.

MEN & CHICKEN Screening Times:
Wed. Sept 16, 10:00 PM BLOOR HOT DOCS CINEMA
Sun. Sept 20, 3:30 PM SCOTIABANK 1

MEN & CHICKEN: Review

In Men & Chicken, Elias and Gabriel are brothers whose father has just passed away. He's left them a videocassette revealing that not only is he not their biological father, but the woman they knew as their mother wasn't their biological mother. He also reveals that the name of their father is Evelio Thanatos.

The half-siblings venture to the tiny island of Ork to confront Thanatos with this news but they are literally chased off by Evelio's other sons, Franz, Josef, and Gregor. Yet, Gabriel and Elias are determined to reunite with their bad-tempered brethren. Men & Chicken is about that struggle.

It's easy to make your audience fall in love with flawed, yet appealing characters and film history is full of them. Even anti-heroes have their charms. What takes genuine skill is making your audience become emotionally invested in characters that they would never dream of even acknowledging in real life, much less caring about. That's Thomas Anders Jensen's genius and what makes Men & Chicken so incredible.

Horror films have their own anti-heroes and flawed characters. The heightened stakes of the genre engender fanaticism of a different sort. When fear, murder, and death are at stake, the intensity of emotion often gives way to intense devotion, hence the heroic stature of villains like Frankenstein or Freddy Krueger.

Men & Chicken, however, doesn't traffic in Grand Guignol, but petty annoyances and genuinely irritating people. You may spend the first half-hour of the film wondering why you are even watching it in the first place. The characters are by turns self-centered, impetuous, ignorant, violent, and frequently repugnant. Men & Chicken straddles a fine line between off-putting and engaging, between exploitative and empathetic.

There are probably critics who will write this film off as being contrived, self-consciously zany, or even pretentious. And it may be all of those things, but to dismiss Men & Chicken for those reasons would do the film a great disservice. It's both a hilarious comedy and a heartbreaking tragedy and the way it fuses the two makes it one of the most unique and unforgettable films you'll ever see.

MEN & CHICKEN Screening Times:
Wed. Sept 16, 10:00 PM BLOOR HOT DOCS CINEMA
Sun. Sept 20, 3:30 PM SCOTIABANK 1