‘Copenhagen Cowboy’ Episode 3 Recap: Maniac Mansion

Now that we’ve reached the halfway point (!!! seriously, this show is only six episodes long!), it seems safe to say that compared to Too Old to Die Young, Copenhagen Cowboy represents a retreat from the transcendent to the merely terrific. That’s nothing for creator/co-developer/director Nicolas Winding Refn to be ashamed of, either. Most shows don’t get anywhere close to terrific! And very few shows indeed (beyond TotDY obviously) have ever looked and felt like this one does.

And if it wasn’t clear by now, I’m glad it looks and feels the way it does. The endless zooms and pans, the glacial pacing, the sparse dialogue, the neon-and-synths neo-noir nightmare vibe: I get that NWR’s thing isn’t for everybody. But it’s certainly for me! And as I’ve argued in the past, I think it’s a mistake to label his style as pretentious or self-indulgent, since by creating so much empty space and time for the eye and mind to wander, he’s actively rewarding patient viewers, not frog-marching them through signposts of his own authorial genius. 

Anyway, plotwise this is an easy one to sum up: Miu has gotten out of the frying pan and into an escalating series of fires. She soon finds that Dragon Palace, the restaurant to which she fled to escape Rosella and André’s house of horrors, and its owner Mother Hulda are under the thumb of another crime boss, Mr. Chiang (Jason Heudil-Forsell). A formidable street fighter, he’s plagued by migraines Miu cures using her powers. But in the process she has a psychic vision of Mother Hulda giving up her little girl to Chiang as collateral for a debt. If she fails to pay, or if she argues when Chiang uses her pigs to dispose of corpses, she’ll never see the poor kid again.

It gets even creepier from there. After one of her very important pigs dies, Hulda takes Miu to a local farm to purchase a replacement, the hungrier the better. Settling on a more enthusiastically omnivorous free-range pig rather than the penned-up ones, she has to trek up to the main house to haggle with the woman who owns the place.

Which is when we discover that this mansion is also the residence of Nicklas, the man who killed Miu’s friend Cimona. We see he’s been having visions of Miu. We see he has long discussions with himself in which he provides his own mother’s voice, encouraging him to become a great murderer in the tradition of “Grandad” and “Uncle Blood Tooth.” We learn that his mother Beate (Maria Erwolter) has an emotionally incestuous relationship with him, and that his father Michael (Thomas Algren) is a terrifyingly happy sex-cult leader of some sort, who believes that the cock is the Lord’s gift of power to those who possess one, like him and his darling son. We watch Nicklas stab a present from his dad with scissors and see blood burst out from it as his parents whoop and cheer. We see that he keeps a coffin for unknown purposes.

“There’s something evil up at that estate,” Miu tells Hulda when they leave, having been given a guided tour by the ghost of Cimona. “Yes,” Hulda agrees. “It’s been there for generations.” Miu vows to return to find out what Cimona was trying to tell her — and, if we know Miu, seek revenge.

One thing you may have gathered from that last paragraph and the whole deal about a place where evil has recurred for generations is that things have taken a very serious turn for the Stephen King around here — specifically Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. Refn hits Kubrick notes hard with his long slow zoomout from Nicklas’s staring, obviously psychotic face, a Kubrick trademark; with Miu’s goggle-eyed vision of Chiang’s kidnapping of Hulda’s daughter, which very much echoes Danny Torrance and Dick Halloran’s visions; and with certain shots of Miu, who’s made to look like one of those two little sisters gone solo. The score, provided primarily I believe by frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez (though a team including Peter Peter, Peter Kyed, and Julian Winding is credited) is deeply indebted to the Shining soundtrack as well, with booming “Dies Irae”-style synths and paranoia-inducing low-volume screeches and hums.

Perhaps the episode’s only concession to the standard Netflix binge model is that it ends on a cliffhanger, with Miu returning to Nicklas’s mansion. In pure genre terms I’m just excited to see how she deals with these monsters, and how she rescues Hulda’s daughter from Mr. Chiang, and how many other crime families she can get herself mixed up in before Copenhagen is completely cleaned up, like Gotham City in Batman’s most satisfying dreams. But I guess that’s a live question, isn’t it — when you’re a vigilante, is the absence of people to punish a dream or a nightmare?

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.