‘Copenhagen Cowboy’ Is So Weird, It’s Shocking Netflix Took a Risk on It

Copenhagen Cowboy finds Nicolas Winding Refn working in his native Denmark for the first time since the 2005 conclusion to his Pusher trilogy, and yet it isn’t a case of the auteur returning to his roots. Rather, the writer/director’s six-episode Netflix series is less a gritty, frenzied crime saga than a heavily stylized genre hybrid on (relative) par with his 2019 Amazon series Too Old to Die Young.

Akin to a noir-horror-Western that operates in a trancelike haze and feels cobbled together from whatever cinematic detritus was floating through its maker’s slumbering reveries, it’s pure, undiluted, off-the-wall Refn—a description that that will strike some viewers as an invitation and others as a warning.

Copenhagen Cowboy, which premiered Jan. 5 on Netflix, boasts bits and pieces of numerous Refn predecessors, from the swoony action of Drive and the Asian-flavored brutality of Only God Forgives, to the fashion-model Grand Guignol of The Neon Demon and the misty menace of Valhalla Rising. Refn has never been shy about wearing his influences on his sleeve, and his latest features nods not only to his own oeuvre but to his favorite celluloid godfather Stanley Kubrick (via multiple The Shining-inspired sequences), Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

Read more at The Daily Beast.