Adam's Apples

Anders Thomas Jensen's Adam's Apples (Adams æbler) opened in 2005 and won Best Danish Film at the Robert Awards alongside multiple Bodil nominations. The film is the second of Jensen's loose Mads-Mikkelsen-collaboration cycle (after The Green Butchers and before Men & Chicken), all built around morally compromised men in deeply odd Danish settings. Jensen, who also wrote screenplays for Susanne Bier (Brothers, After the Wedding) and Lars von Trier, has spent two decades pushing Danish cinema toward its most confrontational comic territory.

Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a stone-faced neo-Nazi recently released from prison, is sent to a remote rural Danish parish to do community service under the relentlessly optimistic care of Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen, transparently disturbed beneath his grin), a country priest who refuses to acknowledge that anything bad ever happens to anybody. Ivan suggests Adam set himself a goal: to bake an apple pie from the apples of the church's single tree. The tree is then attacked by birds, worms, and lightning in succession; Ivan continues to find each new disaster a sign of grace.

The film operates as a black-comic theological argument about whether faith is a moral virtue or a wilful blindness, with Mikkelsen's serene performance as Ivan one of the most charming portraits of a man in active denial in modern cinema. Jensen's collaboration with Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas — begun on Flickering Lights (2000) and The Green Butchers (2003), and extended later through Men & Chicken and Riders of Justice — has become one of the longest-running ensemble partnerships in contemporary Danish cinema, sitting alongside Lars von Trier and Susanne Bier in the post-Dogme generation.