‘Wildland’: Film Review

” sounds more than a little familiar, perhaps the same thought occurred to those who titled it for the international market: Though it goes by “Kød & Blod ” at home, its English-language moniker is all but a synonym for David Michôd’s similarly premised “Animal Kingdom.” That’s not a bad film to resemble in any capacity, though Nordahl’s study of a frail adolescent psyche plunged into a corrupt household has its own sense of ticking dread.

That’s thanks in large part to a key difference from the 2010 film: the protagonist is a girl, 17-year-old Ida, whose desires and vulnerabilities shift the stakes of this hothouse drama. She’s played with terse, tightly wound intelligence by another newcomer, Sandra Guldberg Kampp, who has something of the young Scarlett Johansson about her; it’s hard to imagine Danish casting directors not making further use of her simmering presence.

Topsøe also co-wrote 2017’s impressive immigrant character study “The Charmer,” and on the evidence of her two feature credits thus far, has a neat line in chilly, queasy psychodrama that counts on its viewers to intuit the rage beneath serene faces and surfaces.

There’s room for only one queen bee in this hive, of course, though Bodil entrusts her boys with all the dirty work in the family business: a criminal debt-collection racket, the violent methods of which surely and swiftly go awry before Ida’s eyes.

Rather like the actors, David Gallego’s handsomely muted lensing seeks sinister notes in placid veneers. This is a story of a human darkness that largely unfolds in soft Scandinavian daylight, affording Ida few physical or emotional hiding places. It’s left to a ringingly atonal electronic score by experimental artist Puce Mary to foreground the narrative’s underlying chaos at key moments of crisis; at its subtlest, it just reverberates in the background like musical tinnitus.

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