Adam's Apples

Good Danish black humor.

Adam's Apples is simultaneously a deconstruction and a satire of the Book of Job; the former because it recognizes and highlights the underlying black humor in the biblical text, and the latter because it rightly points out that more than Jobs patience, we should talk about his madness.

Danish priest Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen) is both jobian and quixotic (the costume department deserves a pat on the back for making him look, in his priestly garb, like the subject, thought to be Cervantes, of a portrait attributed to Juan de Jáuregui), his insanity the only thing that makes his crappy life bearable. In a stroke of genius, the film explains Ivans pollyannish disposition with the pythonesque Ravashi Syndrome (Ravashi was an Indian footballer who...

What a strange film... a very good one, mind you.

The cast do great work in this 2005 release. Mads Mikkelsen being the obvious standout - top performance! Ulrich Thomsen doesn't really do all that much necessarily, yet still manages to make a big impact with his showing - amusing, by the way, how much hair can change the way you see someone, that ending is quite the mild cranium contort*!

I'm not really all that sold on what the film attempts to tell, but I can't deny that I had a pleasant time watching it all unfold. I wouldn't actually say it features that strong humour, perhaps some of it was lost in translation (Viaplay's subs were iffy in patches), but all that's there is enough. There is one joke at the death that is probably o...