Men & Chicken
Cineplex Odeon
Mon., Feb. 8, 9:15 p.m.
Rating: Two stars
Enter this creepfest at your own risk. Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s dark, absurdist comedy starring a barely recognizeable Mads Mikkelsen as a mustacheoed oddball and perpetual masturbator who journeys to a filthy, rotting farmhouse on a remote island with his enigmatic, equally dishevelled brother to meet three freaky half-brothers they didn’t know they had is an endurance test.
The film is in itself as grotesque as the slovenly halfwits whose dysfunctional dynamics Jensen chronicles with perverse glee and equal parts lowbrow humour and mordant wit. Jensen’s bizarre, slow-paced excursion into domestic insanity will also surely try the patience of all but diehard fans of twisted humour before we learn why the lunatics of the title look like refugees from A Texas Chainsaw Massacre and behave the way they do.
The best thing about this aggressively weird family saga, which is not for the faint of heart, is its art direction, particularly the family’s dilapidated sanitarium-like homestead where gruesome secrets and misplaced poignancy awaits.