Men & Chicken

Never before was the cream of the Danish actors’ guild this ugly. Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Søren Malling, David Dencik, Nicolas Bro - each a familiar face from many films and series. Here, however, as members of a rather eccentric family, they’re almost unrecognisable.
In search of their biological father, Gabriel (Dencik) and Elias (Mikkelsen) end up in what at first looks like a madhouse - the dwelling of three wild men on a small island cut off from the rest of humanity. The men turn out to be related to them, but exactly how much genetic material all of them share is the pivotal question: the house harbours a tragic family secret.
After his widely acclaimed black comedy Adam’s Apples (2005), a new film by Anders Thomas Jensen was long in the making. Men & Chicken is a supremely idiosyncratic mixture of horror movie and comedy, full of fist fights, bad haircuts, questionable progressive optimism and moving personal revelations.