It’s hard to care for a show that doesn’t seem interested in all of its best parts — and that means it’s even harder to care for Copenhagen cowboy. The new Netflix series drive Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn has all his signature stillness, extreme violence, and neon-filled sets. It also has the most interesting world his work has ever encompassed. It’s just a shame the show doesn’t show it.
[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.]
First, let’s get the important part the show is hiding out of the way: Copenhagen cowboy is about Miu, a happy spirit who fights people and deals drugs – although she spends most of her time just staring at the camera in long, almost static close-ups. It’s also about a family of vampires and the (apparently gauzy) veil between the supernatural denizens of another reality and the Danish criminal underworld.
In other words, this should be one of the most exciting shows of all time. Instead, Refn seems embarrassed by the eccentricities and fantasies of his own world. The show’s first two episodes offer little hint of the world it’s set in, letting strangeness do the job that magic could have. Miu spends the first episode trapped in a Danish brothel seemingly in the middle of nowhere before escaping in the second episode via a dirt road that leads to a similarly remote Chinese restaurant.
Moments like this or when Miu appears to be saving a stillborn baby by breathing life into it are spot on Copenhagen cowboy feels like it’s about to become something anything, more interesting than its grumpy pilot. But the ever-stubborn Refn steers clear of the fairies his series seems to achieve, preferring to keep mentions of blood-drinking and psychic powers on the fringes of a story that focuses mostly on low-level crime with no magical sight .
This closeness to something very special is not limited to Refn’s story (which he co-wrote with Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde). Refn has always been an incredible image composer, uniquely devoted to his own specific aesthetic, and the same is true for Copenhagen cowboy. But with every major visual swing from Refn comes the potential for a major blunder.
When he’s at his best, Refn can transform sparse concrete rooms and bare walls into awe-inspiring backdrops for his characters, while claustrophobic close-ups remain focused on their motionless faces and the tiniest twitches of the actors allow their emotions to be expressed more clearly than words could. Instead of the traditional shot/reverse shot dialogue, Refn spends most of it Copenhagen cowboy The camera pans in a circle, capturing a complex combination of staging and dialogue between characters who may spend half of their spoken lines off-screen as the camera pans away from them. And of course, neon lights flood every room so completely that the actors’ skin seems eerily dripping.
But Refn misses about as often as he hits Copenhagen cowboy – even if some of those hits are home runs. A particularly harrowing example is when Miu enters a trance-like state, somewhere between a ghost world next to ours and the filthy Danish warehouse where she meets a crime boss. During the scene, Miu dances while neon lights around and past her glow and elongate herself and her limbs into refracted light. It’s the kind of moment that should seem like magic. But it doesn’t work. Instead, it looks like Refn lost a bet with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and was forced to recreate the streaming service’s intro somewhere in his series. The lights look cartoonishly faded and unnatural, and instead of being something transcendent, the scene’s spell breaks, instantly turning it into an embarrassing backfire that lays bare some of Refn’s least effective claims.
But all of this only makes the true highlights of the show even more frustrating. Buried in the nearly six hours of silence, silence and occasionally silly imagery is an incredibly cool show about creatures of the underworld that haunt the streets and forests of Denmark and carve their way out of the seediest parts of the world. Refn seems to be saying that if these underworlds are already primed to absorb and exploit the bounty of outcasts from the human world, why make fun of the outcasts of the supernatural world? Everyone has something to offer, so why should a ghost in a blue tracksuit be any different?
But the task of carving that excellent premise out of the show all too often feels Herculean. In sharp contrast to Refn’s previous series, Too old to die young — who suffered from similar problems but often threw herself into outbursts of passion that left the actors long allowed to carry on out of joint explanatory monologues about things like the end of the world — Copenhagen cowboyThe dialogue is frustratingly swollen and stuck in the momentary machinations of its plot.
When the series finally lets loose, mostly in the final episode of this season, when the spirits gather and the vampire chasing them appears, it becomes even harder not to grieve over all the wasted time and all the hours this show has devoted to it spent not even being half as interesting.
None of this is to say that Refn shouldn’t have all the static shots and awe-inspiring images he wants, but when there’s no clear point or meaning behind those images, they begin to crunch over the course of a six-hour season. Even more so as the alternative was the beautiful Danish monster series that he created but seems tragically bored with.
Six episodes of Copenhagen cowboy stream now on Netflix.