‘Copenhagen Cowboy’ Episode 1 Recap: The Witching Hour

It’s true: Nicolas Winding Refn is an acquired taste. It’s true also that after Too Old to Die Young, the ferocious Amazon Prime series he co-created with comics writer Ed Brubaker, the acquisition of that taste should be required by law. An experiment in bold colors, long takes, laconic performances, tedium, horror, disorienting bursts of the supernatural, and no-bones-about-it criticism of the police as a fascist vanguard, TOtDY is, without qualification, one of the very best television shows ever made. NWR 1, his critics 0.

So what does the guy responsible for Drive and The Neon Demon do for a small-screen encore? He makes Copenhagen Cowboy, his first effort in his native Danish since before Ryan Gosling was even a glimmer in his eye. He shifts the scene from the dying American empire to the equally moribund European project. He makes his protagonist a nearly mute magical female sex worker instead of a nearly mute pedophile male cop. He cuts the running time way, way down. He moves from Amazon to Netflix. And he still knocks it out of the fucking park.

Written by Refn (who also directs, duh) and co-developer Sara Isabella Jønsson, Copenhagen Cowboy’s premiere primarily concerns itself with Miu (Angela Bundalovic), a big-eyed, stone-faced, track-jacketed young woman with apparently magical luck powers. She’s been sold into the service of Rosella (Dragana Milutinovic) and André (Ramadan Huseini), half-sibling Albanian immigrants who specialize in wooing young women from that region to Copenhagen with promises of modeling gigs before forcing them into sexual slavery, as a sort of witch-for-rent. Soon after her arrival Miu observes Rosella’s arranged husband Sven (Per Thiim Thim) sexually abusing one of the forced workers, illustrating the women’s claim that this place is “hell.”

Miu’s job is to use her powers — the degree to which she can consciously control them is unclear — to facilitate a pregnancy for Rosella, a woman in late middle age. It seems to work, until Rosella announces her intention to stiff Miu on her fee. She miscarries, perhaps as a result of Miu’s animus towards her, and Miu is forced into the basement with the other sex workers. Most of them bully her, except for kindly Cimona (Valentina Dejanovic), who develops a plan to run away together. 

Cimona gets out, but is intercepted by a driver (Andreas Lykke Jørgensen), who winds up strangling her to death in a slaughterhouse’s pig sty (we’d already seen a glimpse of this in the cold open), roaring like a predator after the fact. This leaves Miu to wait alone at an empty rest stop for a rendezvous that will never come. 

Based on this premiere, Copenhagen Cowboy is not the bolt out of the blue that Too Old to Die Young was. Which stands to reason: After all, Too Old to Die Young already exists, so how could he possibly repeat the way it left virtually all non-Twin Peaks television in the art-horror dust?

But the techniques Refn employs to immerse the viewer in his nightmarish projects have lost none of their efficacy. Long takes, slow zoom-outs, seemingly endless 360-degree-or-more camera pans that show you his icky, beautifully lit settings in their entirety — and, of course, near-peerless cinematic-cool portraiture, in this case specifically of Bundalovic as the bowl-cut heroine Miu as she passively takes in her surroundings.

A lot of contemporary filmmakers use the relative ease with which movies and TV can be shot and colored digitally to take it easy with regards to shot composition and contrast. Not so Refn, who can make riding in the back of a car look like some kind of strange primary-colored starlight reflected off an object floating in deep space.

Coupled with his unapologetic fixation on sordid subject matter and warped criminal glamour, Refn’s work comes across like a portal to hell, which I mean as a high compliment indeed. It’s the kind of show where, when a rapist squeals and oinks like an actual literal pig while getting beaten by a pimp, you just kinda go “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Revisiting the equivalent episode of Too Old reveals that the earlier series hit harder right out of the gate than this one seems to. Admittedly, that could just be the proximity of the material talking: For us Americans, the immigration-driven schism between different regions of Europe feels like a faraway thing, however much we struggle with our own immigration fearmongering, while Too Old’s portrayal of the police as amoral monsters from the very start resonates in an immediate fashion. Whether due to this cultural consideration or some other factor, Copenhagen doesn’t feel so furious, not yet anyway.

But Refn and Jønsson have already constructed what’s essentially an eight-lane highway of violent misogyny in this thing, down which they’re free to drive a truck of stylish but still deeply unpleasant vengeance at any point, much as Refn and Brubaker did in TOtDY. I just want to be there when the pedal hits the metal and the bodies hit the grill. Don’t you?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.