Copenhagen Cowboy TV Review

Last Updated on January 10, 2023

Plot: A thrill-inducing, neon-drenched noir series set across six episodes which follows enigmatic young heroine, Miu. After a lifetime of servitude and on the verge of a new beginning, she traverses the ominous landscape of Copenhagen’s criminal netherworld. Searching for justice and enacting vengeance, she encounters her nemesis, Rakel, as they embark on an odyssey through the natural and the supernatural. The past ultimately transforms and defines their future, as the two women discover they are not alone, they are many.

Review: Nicolas Winding Refn is one of those filmmakers that people either love or love to hate. His resume features some truly outstanding work like Bronson, Pusher, and Drive, as well as more divisive fair like Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon. In the decade since Drive turned him into an icon of atmospheric filmmaking and killer soundtracks, Refn has delved deeper and deeper into self-indulgent projects that have had varying degrees of success. In 2019, his first streaming series Too Old To Die Young, proved that sometimes giving a director a long-form series doesn’t always work out for the best. Whether you like it or not, Refn is back with another limited series, this time on Netflix. Copenhagen Cowboy, Refn’s first Danish-language project since 2005. Simultaneously too long and too short, Copenhagen Cowboy doesn’t showcase any actors American audiences will be too familiar with, which may be the series’ saving grace in allowing us to descend even further down NWR’s rabbit hole of insanity.

Copenhagen Cowboy, a series whose title means nothing beyond Refn thinking it sounded cool, opens in a slaughterhouse full of pigs. As the camera pans, we see a man and a woman standing almost still. The man has his hands around the woman’s neck, strangling her, and the woman feigns fighting back. The two move slightly in a lurid shot framed to look both erotic and disturbing. The following scene shifts to the introduction of Miu (Angela Bundalovic), a woman who brings luck and has been summoned to a brothel to help the madam become pregnant. From there, we learn of Miu’s quest for revenge against Rakel (Lola Corfixen), which unfolds through seemingly bizarre and strange events that do not always connect back in a manner that makes much sense. Being a Nicolas Winding Refn production, we know that even if it doesn’t make sense, it will look and sound good doing so.

Set over six episodes, Copenhagen Cowboy pushes the boundary of narrative storytelling, but not in a good way. With the blank check that working for Netflix provides, Refnn and his co-writers Sara Isabelle Jonsson Vedde, Johanne Algren, and Mona Masri have built a fairy tale and a horror show of sex and violence. At times, there is a beauty in the shocking images on screen but it is frequently overshadowed by the thematic disconnect from scene to scene and episode to episode. There is a moment during a sex scene where Refn syncs the squeals of pigs to a man thrusting his hips; meant to be a commentary on the sexual control of men in the world. It is not the most subtle way of making this comment, but it works. Unfortunately, most of the other moments like this are redundant or even more blatant.

Refn’s films have typically focused on stoic and mysterious characters. While these protagonists are often monosyllabic, there has been enough structure to the rest of the film that we can follow along with the story. Here, Miu offers no voice-over narration and speaks so infrequently that it becomes almost impossible to sympathize with her on her revenge journey. Angela Bundalovic does the best with what she is given, but she could easily have been absent from half of the episodes the series would have remained essentially the same. Every episode is structured so that Miu appears in the scene, but the events occur around her rather than involving her. The few times she is an active participant occur when the story requires fight sequences. Those are the moments when Copenhagen Cowboy finally comes together cohesively before falling back into its original rhythm.

I loved so many moments in Copenhagen Cowboy, but that is really all they were: moments, frames, shots. Nicolas Winding Refn, believe it or not, has been restrained by making feature films with limited running times. That limit being lifted resulted in Too Old To Die Young, which was too long and unfocused. That problem is back in Copenhagen Cowboy. Refn brings all his classics back for encores, including another excellent score by composer Cliff Martinez. His neon-hued imagery remains and is used ad nauseum through the six episodes, sometimes bordering on self-parody. It reached a point that halfway through the third episode, I looked at a scene that could have appeared in Refn’s original Pusher were it not for the intense colors and high fashion. Refn knows exactly what he wants his projects to look like; he doesn’t know how to bring his ideas together.

Copenhagen Cowboy is the opposite of where I expected Nicolas Winding Refn to be in his career. Playing more like a cover band performing tracks by David Lynch and Dario Argento, this series lacks the originality that it thinks it is full of. Instead of delivering a powerful story with original imagery and shocking metaphors, Copenhagen Cowboy is as meaningless as its title. While it looks and sounds fantastic, there is not much more than that. Nicolas Winding Refn has become a director who thinks he is a brilliant auteur. Instead, he is reliant on recycling the few ideas that led people to consider him a genius. Refn’s past projects could work almost like extended music videos, but this series is a music video without the music.

Copenhagen Cowboy is now streaming on Netflix.

Copenhagen Cowboy

BELOW AVERAGE

5