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The most unlikely place for a comedy would be a butcher shop.

And that is the whole point of the very blackest dark Danish comedy

De Gronne Slagter / The Green Butchers (2004).

Fed up with their jobs at the town butcher, two guys start their own place and through a set of circumstances find them having to dispose of a fresh corpse which they are kind of responsible for. Sort of.

What else but to convert the dead meat to fresh product. Needless to say, the new filets are a great success and it is not long before the original carcass is used up.

What to do?

That is what we find out with the wonderful Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas as they try to cover up their success and at the same time find ways to keep the business going with fresh meat supplies. In a word, macabre.

I got this because of Mikkelsen because the idea of him in a comedy is hard to imagine. But he is great. He has a receding hairline and is always sweating with stress. Two gimmicks that help us forget his serious roles and reputation.

Everyone in this comedy turn in wonderful performances and while the line is often nearing, the line of respectability, they never quite go over it.

After all, one of the great taboos is cannibalism. But this kind of incongruity makes the best comedies.

Nothing is slapstick. Nothing is glided over. While it is very funny it is human funny. The best kind. Even the villains are benign.

I loved it and will give it a Netflix 4 as I would not mind seeing it again sometime. A slight stretch but I want to give them the benefit of any doubt. It is that kind of film. Brave and very successful even though it takes the viewer right up to the line of repulsion.

Labels: films