Something is awfully wrong in Skarrild, a very small town with a very high water table far outside Copenhagen, though it’s hard to say just what. This is as true for the characters in Terribly Happy (trailer)—new Marshall Robert Hansen, town bully Jorgen Buhl, and Jorgen’s wife, Ingerlise—as it is for the audience. Robert is dropped off by his chief to begin his duty in the lonely, drab downtown (such as it is) of Skarrild and right away, things seem, well, off.
Robert has been banished to this lonely outpost from his regular beat in Copenhagen after making a “terrible mistake” that’s left him on the outs with his boss and family alike, and he’s here to pass the time, pop anti-depressants, and try to work his way back into everyone’s good graces. We see him placing repeated calls home, just to hear his daughter’s voice on the machine. But then the lonely, possibly unbalanced Ingerlise appears, insisting that her brutish husband beats her, and Robert begins to be drawn into affairs that the townspeople might rather he ignore.
There are many unexplained things in Skarrild. There’s the missing bicycle shop owner. There’s Dorthe, Jorgen and Ingerlise’s young daughter, who pushes her creepy, squeaky baby carriage through the streets at all hours. There’s the local grocer, who locks would-be shoplifters in a strange little closet in his office. And there are all the other subtle, pulsing undercurrents: looks exchanged in the local bar, suggestive references to the last Marshall (whose fate we don’t really know), and the ominous, repeated insistence that in Skarrild “we have our own way of doing things.” Indeed, Robert is constantly reminded of his outsider status, and scolded for the way he confronts shoplifters, drinks, and even hangs out his laundry. What Robert needs to learn most, the townspeople seem to suggest, is not to ask too many questions about things that seem out of place.
Skarrild is one of those self-contained movie places—like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or any place imagined by Tim Burton—and though it looks more or less like the normal world, it has its own rules and logic. You can always feel the potential encroachment of the outside world in this film, and yet the real world always feels removed and unthreatening to the way of life in Skarrild. And the more we learn about Roberts’ past—about the “terrible thing” he did—the more we understand his increasing comfort in this dull, flat place where there is only, as one character puts it, “mud and cows and rubber boots.” Once you stop asking questions and start going along with things, the people of Skarrild might be the best friends you ever had. Or, to put it another way, in Skarrild everything gets sucked down into the mud eventually.
The place seems so perfectly suited to Robert’s state of mind, in fact (not to mention his past sins) that you might wonder if the film will prove to be one of those fever dreams that’s taking place entirely in the troubled protagonist’s head (it isn’t). This is especially true when things take a dark turn and Robert—who for all his expressionless inscrutability, is, we assume, a basically good guy—is revealed to be, perhaps, something else, a man more troubled than we realized. There’s a lot of inversion going on in the movie—Jorgen has unexpected layers, as well, and even the title (both terrible and happy) suggests the sort of ambiguity of mood and feeling present in every frame of the film. The movie’s director and co-writer, Henrik Ruben Genz, obviously owes a great deal to the Coen brothers (and, by proxy, to all of the many directors to whom the Coens owe such a debt), but this is the good kind of imitation: the kind inspired by the superficial trappings of great work, but not afraid to be its own movie.
No matter what Robert’s flaws and mistakes, we’re rooting for him throughout, and that means rooting for him to get back to Copenhagen, something he wants even when he seems to be drawn in by the allure of a place where secrets can stay secret. When the time arrives for his departure, though, in the film’s next-to-last scene, things don’t go as expected and the tone of summing up quickly and quietly blossoms into an almost Twilight Zone kind of widening horror. Robert, it seems, won’t get his wish. So is this a vision of hell, a place where no one says what they mean, where there’s no overriding rule of law, where there’s always something just out of reach, a place of eternal grasping? Just when you think so, the final scene comes, and that feeling is flipped as playful, happy music rises up, there are signs of hope for Robert, and that feeling of awfulness quickly, strangely dissipates. Ultimately, the film seems to be saying, there’s a lot to like about a place like Skarrild, a place where everyone knows your business and nothing is what it seems, yes, but also a place where, once you learn to fit in, you’ll never be safer or more at home.
Terribly Happy is now playing at the Kendall Landmark.
