Trine Dyrholm is spectacularly sociopathic as a retired secret service agent with too much free time on her hands
At TIFF Romania, Benedikt Erlingsson’s mini-series runs in the respective series section, though it would also make a great fit for midnight movies. That is because of the cross-cultural commonality that emerges among the festival’s genre works, and for which the Icelandic director’s latest feature is a prime example: evil neighbors. From the uncanny sounds and hypersensitive residents in a metropolitan apartment block of the Korean Noise to the quaint suburban neighborhood of Iceland, there’s no escaping those next door to you. They will greet you friendly in the hallway and offer you hand-picked carrots from their dainty urban vegetable garden – only to kill your cat if it happens to stroll in said garden.
The latter act is only the first of many criminal and ethical transgressions by the titular character. Ditte Jensen, played with a brilliant balance of squareness, sociopathy, and sadism by Trine Dyrholm, just moved into a plain Icelandic residential building mainly occupied by middle-class families. They call her “the Danish woman”, after her home country, where she used to work for the secret service. Of course, her new neighbors haven’t the faintest clue of this former profession that makes the deceptively harmless elderly single woman a philistine vigilante. Turn the music up too loud, wash the car on the communal lawn, or let your teenage son play video games longer than Ditte approves, and she will act: fast, unnoticed, and ruthless.
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Already Erlingsson’s last work, the feature film Woman at War, showed his fascination for female everyday vengeance. But while the film’s protagonist arguably had a cause and directed her anger against physical targets, Ditte’s attacks are mostly her meddling in her neighbors’ affairs or getting overexcited about trivial matters (like a cat among her carrots). Her interventions are completely disproportional and leave lasting physical and mental impact. Of course, this is supposed to be the fun about this deeply cynical take on civil courage. Therein lies also the ambivalence of the series which clearly sympathizes with its psychopathic protagonist and encourages the audience to do the same. Never mind that she is an outspoken nationalist who expects everyone to speak Danish since “once you were Danish”.
Her jingoism and reactionary ruthlessness is further confirmed when she waterboards one neighbor’s allegedly computer-addicted teenage son, sexually abuses the mean ex-boyfriend of another family’s young daughter, and cruelly manipulates a refugee neighbor from Libya. Rather than undermining his audience’s initial sympathies and showing the slippery slope of law-and-order mentality, Erlingsson insists that torture and sexual violence would be funny. It’s hard to hate a series that shows Dyrholm – a former candidate at the Eurovision song contest – sing and dance to the closing credits of every episode. But Erlingsson’s neo-conservative celebration of bourgeois brutalization does the trick. Nevertheless, the series is interesting as a symptom of escalating national chauvinism, even in the supposedly liberal Scandinavian countries.
So if you want to be utterly freaked out by a bucket-hat wearing, calmly speaking Tine Dyrholm regressing into her old militaristic methods about someone disturbing the peace, go ahead. Just don’t turn up the volume too loud. Who knows what the neighbors will do.
- OT: Danska Konan
- Director: Benedikt Erlingsson
- Year: 2025
