Terribly Happy

Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz

At the Angelika Cinema

Runtime: 90 min.

The creepy-crawly Danish comedy Terribly Happy isn’t interested in satirizing small town life so much as casting a jaundiced eye on a tiny community’s rigidity, one that is more reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s short stories or Thomas Tryon’s terrifying novel Harvest Home than Desperate Housewives.

Not that there aren’t plenty of soapy subplots in Terribly Happy; the movie is crammed with failing marriages, creepy doctors and obliging hookers, while blessed with a cast of character actors who seem to have been found at a David Lynch open call. But director Henrik Ruben Genz refrains from winking at the audience, opting instead for a straight face.

Demoted to marshal of tiny town after his wife leaves him with their daughter, Copenhagen detective Robert (a fantastic Jakob Cedergren, who comes off as a white collar Daniel Craig) finds himself confronted with townies who solve their issues with strangers and criminals by forcing them into the town bog at gunpoint. But when an unbalanced woman comes in to complain that her husband beats her, Robert is drawn into both her family drama and the ways of his new town.

To explain much more would be massively unfair to the film, which ratchets up its stakes in tiny increments that gradually pay off. But the moment when Robert suddenly begins hanging his laundry in the orderly manner of his neighbors, a minor capitulation to the customs of the town, has the force of a slap. And even the story’s sudden swerve into melodrama has the nightmare reality of film noir at its best. As in the best noirs, Robert finds himself gradually growing accustomed to a way of life that seems poisonous at first, but one for which he eventually reveals a genuine flair. In small towns like these, conformity can be far more lethal than a shotgun blast.