In Thomas Daneskov’s Wild Men (original title Vildmænd), Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) has lost his way. A family man with a wife and two daughters at home, Martin’s absconded to the craggy mountains of Norway, clan in Viking attire and armed with a makeshift bow and arrow. He plans to get back to his roots and live off the land like his hunter/gather ancestors of 3000 years ago but his aspirations are beyond the reach of his skillset. We’re witness to Martin’s plentiful limitations as he hunts a goat, striking it in the haunch from afar but unable to track the bloody trail to his would-be dinner. Left instead to smash and charbroil a small toad. The next scene he wretches up his amphibian meal, hunched over and helpless, into the icy river below.

Disillusioned with consumer culture and yet unable to live apart from it, Martin descends the mountain only to further drive a wedge between himself and civilization. His attempt to barter with a gas station attendant for his furs and weaponry goes horribly awry, Martin beating the man in “self-defense” and stealing the wares he came for; essentials which include bags of chips, a cold six pack, and some smokes. The puny local police force, led by the weathered captain Øyvind (Bjørn Sundquist), is soon hot – or, rather, lukewarm -on Martin’s trail.

Pathetically ill-equipped though he may be, Martin finally gets a chance to flex his newfound masculinity when he crosses paths with Musa (Zak Youssef), an injured hash smuggler who’s stumbled into Martin’s encampment. Terribly injured, Musa walked away from a head-on vehicular collision with an elk with a full bag of cash, leaving behind two ill-adjusted colleagues he falsely presumed for dead. Martin gets to work stitching up Musa’s wound in a gruesome and giggly scene that underscores the interplay of Martin’s belief in adopting this old-school style of living and his relative ineptitude at doing so. An early sign of the collision of savagery, violent laughs, and budding camaraderie to come.
As the two lumbering criminals head out on the lamb together, they set their sights on an “authentic” Viking village where other freethinking homesteaders live off the land, away from the penitent eye of smartphones and wifi, outside of the unyielding pull of commerce. Or so they presume. Dansekov (The Elite), working from a darkly comedic script he co-wrote with Morten Pape, grapples with Martin’s strange midlife crisis genuinely, giving weight to the underlying seeds of a man who sees himself as a disappointment, who has separated from his family as a way of reclaiming his masculinity and identity, while packing in plenty of hysterical exchanges between the colorful cast of characters, many of whom cosplay in furs.

One of the great ironies of Wild Men is that despite Martin’s persistent disappointment with other’s failures to live off the land, even the cloak of animal skins he wears was almost definitely purchased somewhere. The disappointment and heartbreak Martin experiences as he comes to terms with the reality that a life of solitude and self-reliance is beyond his grasp is reflected in his relationship with his wife Anne (Sofie Gråbøl) and their two girls, driving an existential reckoning with his own sense of worth and his place amongst the world.

“We are all playing dress up,” one character wisely intones. The cops. The robbers. The loving wife. Martin in his ensemble of skins. Especially, Martin in his ensemble of skins. Everyone at some point is forced to choose a part in life and continue to play that role ad infinitum. For many, this becomes the breaking point that’s so often associated with a midlife crisis: why am I doing this? Is this all I am? Or, to quote Julian Casablancas, “Is this it?“ For a road trip movie about sore-thumb criminals, Wild Men maturely grapples with these philosophical musing, finding an intersection between dark comedy and genuine profundity. Sometimes it takes a trip to the wild side to realize that modern comforts and the warmth of a nuclear family are a worthy evolution.

CONCLUSION: Starkly funny and wholly original, the sensational Danish dark comedy ‘Wild Men’ sees a forty-something father in the midst of a midlife crisis wander into the wilderness to unwittingly befriend a drug smuggler and run from the police. An outstanding cast of characters and sparkling writing makes this one Tribeca’s best debuts.