Flickering Lights

Released in 2000, Flickering Lights (Blinkende lygter) was the feature directing debut of Anders Thomas Jensen, by then already one of Denmark's most sought-after screenwriters and an Oscar winner for his live-action short Election Night. It set out the register he would keep returning to throughout his career, most recently in Riders of Justice, in which extreme violence, deadpan absurdity and unexpected tenderness sit side by side.

Four Copenhagen criminals, played by Søren Pilmark, Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas (the loose repertory company Jensen would go on using), flee a botched job with a bag of someone else's money. Stranded in the Jutland countryside, they drift into the unlikely project of restoring a ruined roadside restaurant, and the gangster comedy gradually becomes something stranger and sadder as each man's buried past comes to the surface. The ensemble's chemistry drives the film from scene to scene, and Mikkelsen, several years before international fame, is already magnetic.

A sizeable hit in Denmark, Flickering Lights became a touchstone of the post-Dogme Danish comedy boom and a cult favourite well beyond Scandinavia. It won audience and craft prizes at the Robert Awards and started Jensen's run of darkly comic ensemble films. Anyone curious about Nordic gallows humour, or about where Jensen's later films came from, should begin here.