Directed by:
Anders Thomas JensenScreenplay:
Anders Thomas JensenCinematography:
Sebastian BlenkovComposer:
Jeppe KaasCast:
Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen, Nicolas Bro, Paprika Steen, Ali Kazim, Ole Thestrup, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Gyrd Løfquist, Lars Ranthe, Peter Reichhardt (more)Plots(1)
Ivan is an insanely optimistic preacher who takes in convicts to help around the remote, rural church he ministers to. His current charges are a psychotic Saudi immigrant addicted to robbing gas stations and an alcoholic tennis pro convicted of sexual assault. His newest "helper" is Adam, a vicious neo-Nazi anxiously biding his time before he can return to hell-raising. Asked to set a goal for his stay, Adam sarcastically answers that he'd like to bake a cake. Ivan cheerfully takes that statement at face value and puts him in charge of the parish's pride and joy: the only apple tree in the vicinity. Grasping the extent of Ivan's crazed, preternatural determination to look on the bright side of everything - Adam immediately decides to shake him out of his rose-colored stupor. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (7)
On an Old Testament basis, Jensen created a layered story in which visually uncharacteristically exacerbated motifs play the main role in Nordic cinema of the "great other" (God/ reality / symbolic order... whatever...), but hand in hand with them go the very typical "indirect dialogues". The characters talk, but the meaning of their speech depends on a symbolic plane - not in what is said, but in the subtle interaction of hints, silences and hidden meanings. Mads Mikkelsen's character, however shrouded in biblical stigmas, is purely human at his core, and his message that it is necessary to escape from reality at the cost of merciful deceptions softens even the sometimes "overly" monumental symbols. It's not about them, about some elusive entities and big ideas, but rather about that warm-frosty secondary life in which all the characters experience firsthand that each of us needs apple pie and closed eyes to turn the seemingly cruel absurdity of existence into a bearable game. Whether Ivan is Job (or just a blind man) and Adam enticed by Satan (or just a fool living a delusion), Adam's Apples tastes sour and you can't tear yourself away from it. There's a taste of hope, escape and sweet returns in the film. Not a dizzyingly deep, yet wonderfully "true" film about having no lasting truths and unshakable certainty. A black biblical tragicomedy.
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You got to hand it to the Danes. Political correctness is a fairly unknown concept to them. Tasteful black humor with wider significance. At first glance perhaps a bizarre combination, but incredibly funny and, most importantly, good. After Flickering Lights, Anders Thomas Jensen again confirms his talent for “good little" movies. And from now on I am going to give apple pies a very wide berth. You never know what Nazi has been rummaging about in them.
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You’d expect me to boo this film, as my opinion of all kinds of gods and blind faith is...well, let's just say it’s not good. I had a surprisingly good time with this film, though. Ivan was truly perfect in his consistent and almost unshakable denial of reality. The film was full of excellent, sophisticated humor. Plus, the combination of oil – eggplant – racket was simply hilarious.
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It stars Mads Mikkelsen, but the film was weird for my taste. I wasn't extremely interested in anything, it's not funny or entertaining, I didn't really like the characters, and a few minutes after it was over I had trouble telling in two sentences what it was about. Not much 50%
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Current cinema has a lot of problems, but perhaps the most threatening of all is political correctness, which reeks of self-censorship and self-deception. In the end, it annoys the viewer by leading to predictable points and dulling the edge of satire, humor, and serious drama that aims to criticize social disorder. It is precisely the political incorrectness and absolute unpredictability of the behavior of the film characters that significantly elevates Adam's Apples above today's film productions. The psychological battle between a passionately believing priest, a cynical technocrat in the form of a local doctor, and, above all, a discharged convict active neo-fascist Adam is presented in an unusual form of tragicomedy, which often teeters on the furthest boundary of what we can label as socially acceptable. However, that is precisely what makes it valuable to me, and very few films in recent years have given me as much joy as this one. Overall impression: 95%.
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