Film Review: Wild Men is a tale of self-inflicted tragedy and derived authenticity

Wild Men: a skewing of the toxic masculinity under the surface of Viking fetishisation

★★★★☆

Wild Men (15A) opens on Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) wandering through the Norwegian forest clad in deerskins and attempting to kill his dinner with a bow-and-arrow.

But Martin is no ordinary Viking: when all else fails, Martin simply descends from the mountain and holds up a convenience store. 

Martin, it seems, is a white-collar worker who has deserted his wife Anne (Sofie Gråb ø l) and children to live ‘the authentic life’, so when he encounters Musa (Zaki Youssef) alone in the mountains, he simply assumes that Musa is a like-minded chap rather than a drug-dealer on the run with a bag full of illicit cash...

Written by Thomas Daneskov and Morten Pape, with Daneskov directing, Wild Men opens as a black farce about male bonding, with Martin talking a good game about how men are genetically programmed to live as hunter-gatherers who need only solitude and fresh air to thrive, although the more he talks, the more he doth protest too much.

Rasmus Bjerg and Zaki Youssef make for a good double-act, one playing make-believe as a latter-day Viking, the other a small-time criminal separated from his young son and desperate to experience even a tiny amount of the ‘suffocating’ love and family that Martin is running from. 

Toss in the offbeat police detective Øyvind (Bj ø rn Sundqvist) who is hot on Musa’s trail, and you have the makings of a Norwegian Coen Brothers’ black comedy, albeit one that gradually descends into pathos as Musa and Martin come to terms with their self-inflicted tragedies.

(IFI / digital release)