Direction: Jeanette Nordahl
Country: Denmark
In Jeanette Nordahl’s debut feature Wildland, an introverted 17-year-old is caught in the criminal web weaved by her family. The statement that opens and closes this journey - “for some people, things go wrong before they even begin” - adjusts perfectly since this austere family crime-drama almost feels like a noir coming-of-age film loaded with corrosive toxicity.
After her mother’s death, Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) becomes an orphan and goes to live with her aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen), whom she had never met before. She quickly learns that the domineering matriarch commands a group of robbers that consists of her three sons - the immature Mads (Besir Zeciri), the reserved David (Elliott Crosset Hove) and the authoritarian Jonas (Joachim Fjelstrup). Ida enjoys all the attention she gets from her cousins, but what was fun at first becomes a nightmare when an operation goes wrong and the relationships grow tenser.
Shot with clarity as it is magnificently photographed by the expert David Gallego (Embrace of the Serpent, 2015; I Am Not a Witch, 2017; Birds of Passage, 2018), Wildland is an unsettling ride that flows at a calculated pacing, encompassing topics such as loyalty to and sacrifice for the family, identity, sense of belonging, and the choice between the good and the bad.
There’s plenty of disturbing aspects in the plot by Ingeborg Topsøe that makes the film compulsively watchable. The performances are strong - not only from Kampp and Knudsen who are at the center, but also from Hove who truly impressed me (it will take me some time to forget the immense emptiness in his look). This uncompromisingly ugly story managed to linger in my mind after its conclusion.
