Television Review: Copenhagen Cowboy (2022)
In the modern digital landscape, scrolling through social media platforms often feels like navigating a labyrinth of self-aggrandising content. You will frequently stumble into elaborate posts with titles like “I Watched This Film or TV Series So You Don’t Have To,” written by critics or influencers attempting to position themselves as arbiters of taste. These pieces of content are often pretentious. However, on certain occasions, such titles are not only appropriate but almost mandatory. One of the more recent examples that cries out for this kind of dismissal is Copenhagen Cowboy, the 2022 six-part television miniseries written and directed by the Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn.
At its core, Copenhagen Cowboy is a chaotic amalgamation of genres, blending Nordic noir with elements of fantasy and horror. The protagonist, Miu, is played with a deliberately impassive, almost robotic intensity by Danish-Serbian actress Angela Budanović. Miu is an 18-year-old woman living in Denmark as an undocumented migrant, rumoured to possess psychic abilities, though the series is strangely reticent about defining exactly what those abilities are. The narrative kicks off when Miu is brought to the dilapidated house of Rosella (Dragana Milutinović). Rosella is an older Serbian woman who, having heard that Miu can bring luck to anyone around her, offers her money in exchange for helping her get pregnant. This transaction sets off a chain of unfortunate events that quickly spirals into a nightmare.
Rosella’s stepbrother, Andre (Ramadan Huseini), is an Albanian gangster who runs a brothel under the guise of a modelling agency. Rosella, after attempting to cheat Miu out of her money and subsequently suffering a miscarriage, has Miu locked up with a group of trafficked girls. It is here that the series introduces Cimona (Valentina Dejanović), one of the captives with whom Miu forms a bond. Together, they hatch a plan to escape, but tragedy strikes when Cimona runs into Nicklas (Andreas Lykke Jørgensen). Nicklas is a psychopathic young man from a local affluent family who strangles Cimona on his family’s pig farm. Miu eventually rallies the other prostitutes, convincing them to turn on their handlers and escape, only to find herself in a much grimmer situation.
Miu eventually finds temporary shelter at the "Dragon Palace," a diner owned by Mother Hulda (Lili Zhang), a Chinese woman who buys pigs from Nicklas’s family farm. This location is also a body disposal site for the Chinese gangster Mr. Chiang (Jason Hendil-Forssell), who holds Mother Hulda’s daughter, Ai, captive. When Miu learns about Nicklas’s role in Cimona’s death, she confronts him, leading to a violent fight that ends with Nicklas being seriously injured. He is left in the farm with the pigs, which eventually gnaw at him, leaving him grotesquely disfigured. The narrative then shifts to Copenhagen, where Miu travels to meet Miroslav (Zlatko Burić), a former gangster who has become an influential lawyer. He arranges for Miu to work as a drug courier mentored by a gangster named Danny (Ebiriama Jaiteh). When a gang war erupts, Danny is killed, and Miu seizes the opportunity to get her hands on a large amount of cocaine.
Miu attempts to use the drugs to buy Ai from Mr. Chiang, but he insists she instead kills Miroslav’s friend Dušan (Slavko Burović), another part of the organised crime scene. Miu complies, but when she rejects Chiang’s romantic advances, it leads to a fight in which Miu kills him. Meanwhile, the grotesquely disfigured Nicklas kills his mother and uses her blood to ritualistically revive his half-sister Rakel (played by Lola Corfixen), who has been held in a coffin and possesses the same abilities as Miu.
Visually, Copenhagen Cowboy should best be described as an ultra-stylish 1980s music video expanded to six hours. Nicolas Winding Refn, much like in his later films, demonstrates a remarkable sense of style. The miniseries is often a visual feast, featuring interesting costume design, dramatic lighting, and bright colours that feel increasingly rare on modern television screens. These striking images are invariably accompanied by atmospheric electronic music that sets a dreamlike, often dissonant tone. The production values are undeniably high, creating a neon-soaked aesthetic that feels like a deliberate rejection of contemporary TV trends.
Unfortunately, all those impressive sights and sounds are held together by a script that simply does not make sense. The writing, credited to Sara Isabella Jönsson, Johanne Algren and Mona Masri, is frustratingly incoherent. Even with Refn’s penchant for extending shots as long as possible, allowing viewers to soak in every visual detail, audiences are likely to struggle to set apart certain characters or understand their motivations. The narrative drifts from one set piece to another without a strong through-line, often leaving the viewer wondering why they are watching a particular scene at all.
In the end, Refn is forced to abandon the "show, don't tell" principle, attempting to explain the plot through dialogue. However, this exposition only proves to be confusing and contributes to the miniseries’ excessive running time. The pacing is sluggish, and the narrative often feels like it is meandering rather than progressing toward any meaningful conclusion. The viewer is subjected to long stretches of silence and visual stasis that fail to build tension or character depth.
Some critics might be tempted to view the script as some sort of feminist allegory. The portrayal of men is particularly grotesque, with one male character, Rosella’s Danish husband Sven (played by Per Thiim Thim), literally squealing like a p. Others might see it as a social commentary, pitting undocumented immigrants—Serbians, Albanians, Chinese, and Africans—against the establishment embodied in blonde, aristocratic, and vampiric figures like Nicklas and his semi-incestuous family. However, these interpretations only try to give sense to a story where Refn himself failed to do the heavy lifting. The allegories feel tacked on rather than organic, serving as superficial layers over a narrative that lacks structural integrity.
For instance, the true nature of Miu’s abilities, or her background—is she an angel, a demon, a creature from a parallel dimension, or, as she once cryptically claims, a victim of alien abduction—is never explained. As the miniseries reaches its end, it becomes apparent that none of these questions will get answered, and audiences are even deprived of the final Boss fight that would have tied the narrative threads together, featuring Miu—who has been joined by a small band of her "sisters" wearing matching track suits—against Rakel. The absence of this climax makes the entire series feel like a truncated pilot rather than a complete story.
Despite the narrative shortcomings, the miniseries benefits from a decent and very diverse casting. Angela Budanović does what she can with a deliberately one-dimensional character. For the majority of the runtime, Miu does very little and keeps her face totally emotionless, attempting to resemble Buster Keaton. The rest of the cast is much more interesting. The best known is undoubtedly Zlatko Burić and Slavko Burović, who have played iconic gangster characters in Refn’s Pusher trilogy. Their presence, although they have different names, can turn Copenhagen Cowboy into some sort of spiritual sequel, offering a familiar comfort to fans of Refn’s earlier work. Additionally, the famous Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima appears in a cameo as a fictional version of himself and Miroslav’s client, offering the lawyer cryptic advice on how to handle Miu.
Whether that was actually Refn’s intention or not is a question that will likely never be answered. A Netflix-produced documentary about the miniseries suggests that he approached this project without any clear idea of what he would do. The narrative arc involving Nicklas and his half-sister Rakel, which ultimately becomes Miu’s counterpart, seems to have been an idea that came to him only sometimes during the production process, suggesting a haphazard construction rather than a carefully planned vision.
It looks very likely that the production ran out of budget and Refn ran out of ideas, forcing him to end the miniseries in an abrupt manner. He was likely hoping that his reputation and the few positive reviews from the 2022 Venice Film Festival premiere might allow Netflix to renew it for a second season. Netflix, in a rare instance of making the right decision, opted not to, thus saving many viewers from enduring an extra six hours that would have been better spent on something else. Copenhagen Cowboy is a beautiful nightmare that never quite wakes up, remaining a stylish but ultimately hollow exercise in style over substance.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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