Shudder Saturday: Small Town Killers (2017)

A Danish crime comedy that feels very much like a minor Coen brothers movie from early on in their filmography, this is a tale of unhappy spouses hiring killers to deal with their problems, soon realising that the initial idea was only good in theory, and love still remains.

Nicolas Bro and Ulrich Thomsen play Ib and Edward, respectively. Ib is married to Gritt (Mia Lyhne). Edward is married to Ingrid (Lene Maria Christensen). When the men are not being hassled by the local law enforcement (Heinz, played by Søren Malling), they are being given grief by their unhappy wives. And so, after a session of heavy drinking, Edward staggers to a computer and orders an assassin. The Russian (Marcin Dorocinski) arrives, the men wonder if they'll be able to call off the whole thing, and events spiral from there, especially when the women hear of the scheme and hire their own killer, an eccentric elderly English lady named Miss Nippleworthy (Gwen Taylor).

Written and directed by Ole Bornedal (who gave us the excellent Nightwatch about 25 years ago), Small Town Killers is an amusing black comedy that plays around with ideas familiar to anyone who has seen almost any other film in this vein. It's not trying to be groundbreaking or revelatory. It's just trying to be entertaining, which it manages. It's just a shame that Bornedal couldn't find a way to step things up slightly. He has a great cast, yet they often feel as if they're not being used to their full potential.

Bro and Thomsen are endearing losers, with Thomsen doing a particular good number of hangdog expressions of exasperation. Lyhne and Christensen help to keep their characters from being shrill caricatures, instead portraying a pair of women understandably unhappy with husbands who seem to have stopped appreciating them, or making much of an effort, a long time ago. Both Dorocinski and Taylor are very good in their very different performances, with the former being almost permanently drunk, or at least slightly dazed, and the latter being cool and evil under a cunning disguise of old age and politeness.

Amusing, as I already said, but never hilarious. Dark, but never as dark as it could be. Small Town Killers keeps itself very much in a safe middle ground, despite the nature of the content, and that's the biggest problem that it has. Bornedal should have ramped up either the comedy or the darkness. In fact, I suspect ramping up the latter would have automatically helped with the former. There are some onscreen deaths, of course, but this is a film that I suspect would have benefited from a higher bodycount and a sense of increasing mayhem and danger.

If you get the chance to see this without paying any extra for it (e.g. it is on Shudder at the moment) then give it a go. No individual part of it completely fails, and the pacing whisks you speedily enough from the start to the finish. It's just not one that you'll remember a few months later, until someone else mentions it and you give a nod and let them know it was okay.

6/10

You can buy the movie here.