Copenhagen Cowboy assessment: the most boring version of the coolest show

It’s arduous to care a couple of show that doesn’t appear taken with all its greatest elements — and meaning it’s even more durable to care about Copenhagen Cowboy. The new Netflix sequence from Drive author and director Nicolas Winding Refn has all his trademark stillness, his extremely violence, and his neon-drenched units. It additionally has the most attention-grabbing world his work has ever included. It’s only a disgrace the show doesn’t show it off.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Copenhagen Cowboy season 1, but you should read it anyway, because this is really the only way you might finish this show.]

Let’s get the vital half, which the show retains hidden, out of the method first: Copenhagen Cowboy is about Miu, a fortunate spirit who fights individuals and offers medicine — even when most of her time is simply spent observing the digicam in lengthy, almost static close-ups. It’s additionally a couple of household of vampires and the (apparently paper-thin) veil between the supernatural denizens of one other actuality and the Danish legal underworld.

In different phrases, this ought to be one of the most thrilling reveals ever. Instead, Refn appears embarrassed by the eccentricities and fantasy of his personal world. The first two episodes of the show barely even supply a touch at the world it’s set in, letting strangeness do the work that magic may have. Miu spends the first episode trapped in a Danish brothel that’s seemingly in the center of nowhere, earlier than escaping in the second down a mud highway that results in a equally remoted Chinese restaurant.

Moments like these, or when Miu appears to save lots of a stillborn child by respiratory life into it, are when Copenhagen Cowboy feels prefer it’s on the verge of being one thing, something, extra attention-grabbing than its dour pilot. But, the eternally obstinate Refn steers clear of the fae his sequence appears primed to achieve out to, preferring to maintain mentions of blood-drinking and psychic powers at the periphery of a narrative that principally facilities on low-level crime with no magical powers in sight.

Image: Netflix

Image: Netflix

This proximity to one thing really particular isn’t simply restricted to Refn’s story (which he co-wrote with Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde) both. Refn has at all times been an unbelievable composer of photographs, singularly dedicated to his personal particular aesthetic, and that’s no much less true in Copenhagen Cowboy. But with each large visible swing from Refn comes the potential for an enormous miss.

When he’s at his greatest, Refn can flip sparse concrete rooms and clean partitions into hanging backdrops for his characters as claustrophobic close-ups keep skilled on their unmoving faces, letting the actors’ tiniest twitches play out their feelings extra clearly than phrases would possibly. Rather than conventional shot/reverse shot dialogue, Refn spends most of Copenhagen Cowboy panning the digicam in a circle, choosing up a posh mixture of staging and dialogue between characters who could spend half of their spoken traces off display as the digicam rotates away from them. And, of course, neon lights drench each room so fully that it appears to eerily drip off the actors’ pores and skin.

But Refn misses about as usually as he hits in Copenhagen Cowboy — even when just a few of these hits are residence runs. One notably jarring instance comes as Miu enters a trance-like state, someplace between a spirit world adjoining to ours and the dirty Danish warehouse she’s assembly against the law boss in. During the scene, Miu dances whereas neon lights shine round and previous her, elongating themselves and her limbs into refracted gentle. It’s the form of second that ought to appear like magic. But it doesn’t work. Instead it seems to be like Refn misplaced a guess with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and was compelled to re-create the streaming service’s intro someplace in his sequence. The lights look cartoonishly light and unnatural, and, somewhat than one thing transcendent, the scene’s spell breaks, instantly turning it into an embarrassing misfire that lays naked some of Refn’s least efficient pretensions.

But all of this solely makes the show’s true highlights extra irritating. Buried inside the almost six hours of stillness, quietness, and sometimes goofy photographs is a tremendously cool show about Netherworld creatures haunting the streets and forest of Denmark, carving paths for themselves out of the seediest elements of the world. Refn appears to need to say that if these underworlds are already primed to soak up and exploit the items of outcasts from the human world, why ought to they scoff at the outcasts of the supernatural world? Everyone’s obtained one thing to supply, so why ought to a spirit in a blue tracksuit be any totally different?

But the job of digging that wonderful premise out of the show too usually feels Herculean. In sharp distinction to Refn’s earlier sequence, Too Old to Die Young — which suffered from related issues however usually threw itself into bursts of ardour the place actors have been allowed to go lengthy on unhinged, explicative monologues about issues like how the world would possibly finish — Copenhagen Cowboy’s dialogue is frustratingly turgid and caught in the moment-to-moment machinations of its plot.

When the sequence lastly does let free, principally on this season’s ultimate episode as spirits converge and the vampire looking them emerges, it turns into much more troublesome to not mourn all that wasted time and all the hours this show spent not being even half this attention-grabbing.

None of that is to say that Refn shouldn’t have all the static photographs and hanging photographs he needs, however when there’s not any clear level or that means behind these photographs, they begin to grate over the course of a six-hour season. This is much more true when the various was the beautiful Danish monster sequence he created however appears tragically bored by.

Six episodes of Copenhagen Cowboy are actually streaming on Netflix.