One of the cruel realities of being born is that you don’t get to choose your family. For better or worse, bonds written in blood are inescapable, even when they become a burden. This fact weighs heavily on Gabriel (David Dencik), the protagonist of Anders Thomas Jensen’s fourth feature film, Men and Chicken.
An accomplished but lonely scientist, Gabriel leads a shabby and solitary life, his only companion his brother Elias (Mads Mikkelsen), a boorish, possessive man-child and compulsive masturbator. A ray of hope comes into Gabriel’s life in the form of his father’s deathbed revelation that he and Elias were adopted and are in fact only half-brothers, and that their father (the not-so-subtly named “Evelio Thanatos”) is a brilliant but disgraced geneticist. With an insecure Elias in tow, Gabriel heads to the remote and sparsely populated island where his father resides with three more half-brothers, hoping for a second shot at a better family. What he finds, in many ways, proves to be the inverse of what he hopes, and leads him into a mystery that has shocking implications for Gabriel and his newfound family.
Most of the film’s action centers around the abandoned sanitarium where the Thanatos family lives. The palatial complex has fallen into absolute disarray and filth, roamed by deformed livestock, and its state reflects that of its inhabitants. The three half-brothers are every bit as outlandish and off-putting as Elias. Franz (Soren Malling) is the violent and exceptionally disfigured eldest brother who acts as the head of the household in his father’s absence. His younger siblings are the obese and comically analytical Josef (Nicolas Bro) and the youngest and most girl-crazy, Gregor (Nikolaj Lie Kaas).
Men and Chicken is a unique film, but a fairly oppressive one. Jensen attempts to walk a tight line between the film’s fantastical, fairytale-like theme and its squalid horror-movie setting with its broad, bawdy and physical comedy. The extremity of these competing elements makes them difficult to reconcile. There’s implied bestiality, implied child abuse of various stripes and the implied beating of a woman with a taxidermied fox. Even though the worst of it happens off-screen, it’s pretty grim stuff, even for a black comedy. There are a few key plot twists along the way as well, but an attentive viewer is likely to get to them long before the characters in the film do.
Fortunately, the actors throw themselves into their roles with great gusto. Fannibals still smarting from their favorite show’s cancellation will get a kick out of Mads Mikklesen, who portrays a character about as different from the esteemed Dr. Lector as could be imagined. With his unkempt wig and prosthetic cleft palate, he walks around with a look on his face as though the world is a bathroom stall and someone is always walking in on him using it. He brings both humor and pathos to a deeply unpleasant character. And Jensen does manage to squeeze a few laughs out of the material. Josef’s psychoanalytic commentary on the story of Abraham and Isaac stands out as a highlight, in particular. Also notable is the score by Frans Bak and Jeppe Kaas, which prominently incorporates the otherworldly tones of a singing saw and lends warmth to the onscreen parade of debasement.
There appears to be a noble impulse at the heart of Men and Chicken, namely to celebrate that spark of dignity that exists in even the most loathsome and pitiable among us. The film’s ending provides a renewal, of sorts, to the Thanatos family line, but in order to accept that renewal, one must turn a blind eye to some unsettling events. “Life is life,” the film’s unnamed child narrator asserts in its final frames, “and the alternative is never to be preferred.” Despite his best intentions, Jensen has created a film of such spectacular ugliness that it calls into question even this simple, humanist statement.