Television & radioThere is something rotten in the church of Denmark – and it’s the raging, philandering priest who tears his family apart in this thrilling TV drama
Remember a few years ago how we were all wearing Faroe Isle jumpers in homage to Sophie Gråbøl, AKA Sarah Lund from The Killing? This year I’m starting a TV trend by wearing, even as I write, a ruff like those sported by Elizabeth I and Francis Drake, now appropriated by Lars Mikkelsen, the disturbed priest in Ride Upon the Storm, a new subtitled offering from Walter Presents. It really itches. Still, trust me, there’s nothing like a bit of Danish ruff.
The Church of Denmark still encourages its priests to wear this concertinaed item to confer dignity to their office. Sadly, any such dignity gets systematically tarnished over the course of Ride Upon the Storm. Something is rotten in the church of Denmark, namely Mikkelsen’s Johannes Krogh, a charismatic patriarch who nonetheless drives his sons to tragic rebellions, his wife into the arms of a Norwegian woman, and is prone to philandering, not to mention epic booze binges when he doesn’t get what he wants.
And what he wants at the start of this compelling, troubling drama is to become a bishop. Intolerably, a woman rival gets the promotion he thinks is rightfully his. Worse yet, she sets about putting in place cost-cutting measures, such as closing churches with minimal footfall, in a way that drives him into beardy rages. These confirm him not as the vital leader the church needs but as pale, male and stale.
Mikkelsen, who played Troels Hartmann in The Killing then went on to play a sinister Scandi baddie in Sherlock and a terrifying Russian president in House of Cards, has already won an Emmy for his performance as a man needing emergency anger management after finding himself on the wrong side of history. Krogh is a misogynist who can’t bear having a woman boss (“The bloody bitch can’t stand me!” he wails self-pityingly) and who scuppers his marriage by having it off with the gardener.
It’s a terrific performance (and one that made the hitherto atheist Mikkelsen find God), though both the ruff and the Church of Denmark could do with a PR makeover by the end. By that point, Krogh has been abandoned by what remains of his sanity. It can’t be a coincidence that Johannes is also the name of the priest in Danish director Carl Dreyer’s 1955 masterpiece Ordet, who has a breakdown after reading too much Kierkegaard and comes to believes he is Jesus Christ risen. The new Johannes’s mission and madness are similar.
And yet the ruff symbolises what he wants from his family – namely to continue his ancestors’ 250-year association with the church, irrespective of the cost. So when his prodigal son, August, returns from serving in Iraq as an army chaplain with a terrible secret, it must be concealed, not for August’s good but for the sake of the family’s unblemished record. What Adam Price, creator of political drama Borgen, has written is a Danish-style Secrets and Lies, with just an unwitting hint of Keeping Up Appearances.
Like Hamlet’s father, August is haunted throughout the series, which eventually prompts him to give up the pomp of the church. The second, less favoured son is no less troubled. In the first episode, Christian is found to have plagiarised his business studies thesis. Only when we learn that he chose to study the ways of Mammon to infuriate his dad does this lapse make sense. But the plagiarism hurls him into an existential crisis that culminates in a Nepalese monastery.
In their different ways, then, both sons flee their Lutheran heritage, overturning the patriarch’s dynastic dreams.
Ride Upon the Storm is redolent of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film portrait of a family mangled by patriarchal missteps, Festen, and yet Kierkegaardian enough to bear out Price’s remarks that “faith should also be understood as something above religion, the driving force in our lives. Not only faith in God, but also our faith in love, in each other, in ourselves.” In that sense, everyone in Ride Upon the Storm is having a crisis of faith – whether it be in Christianity, family or marriage.
And the women? They’re largely ciphers. Though I was thrilled to see another actor from The Killing, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen as Elisabeth, her flip from too-supportive wife to woman finding extra-marital fulfilment in a lakeside sauna is schematic.
Worse, instead of treating abortion as something women can rightly choose, it uses abortion – as so often happens in TV drama – as a dramatic possibility dangled then withdrawn, only to deliver a trite irony that I won’t blab because to do so would ruin the ending for those who haven’t seen it yet.
What I can say is that the ending has a hysterical aura that reminds me of another Danish denouement, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, in which Emily Watson’s character, after being gang raped and killed by sailors, then refused burial by Calvinist priests, is (on one interpretation) taken to glory symbolised by church bells ringing in the sky. Ride Upon the Storm’s finale is similarly freighted with meditation on the perils and comforts of faith, but it scarcely brings closure. Season two is already in the can. I’ve no idea what it will be about, but I’m mothballing my ruff in readiness.
Ride Upon the Storm is on Walter Presents on All 4 now.
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