Showdown in Jutland : Half noir, half Western, all Danish, ‘Terribly Happy’ is a bitter, twisting ode

Limitless horizons, flatlands, cowboy hats and lonesome saloons. The icons tell us we should be in the Midwest, but instead, in “Terribly Happy,” the landscape belongs to Jutland, Denmark’s nowhereland of floodplains, bogs and marshes. But what better place to set a thriller that borrows unabashedly from Westerns and film noir?

“Terribly Happy,” a new film by director Henrik Ruben Genz, based on the droll novel by Erling Jepsen, finds among its bogs the ingredients it needs to make an impressive feature that tips its Stetson to a history of 20th-century American film, but stakes out its own territory.

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