Pusher

A+

Within its action-thriller genre, a small-budget masterpiece.

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Nicolas Winding Refn rated highly for Valhalla Rising and Drive; it was time to watch the Danish writer-director's first Pusher movie, his 1996 debut feature, an action-thriller about Copenhagen drug gangsters.

Within its genre, it's a small-budget masterpiece. It won no awards in Denmark other than a Best Supporting Actor accolade for Croatian-born Zlatko Buric (as Milo, the Yugoslav top drug dealer). Unfortunately for Refn, the competition that year included not only Lars von Trier's Oscar-nominated Breaking The Waves but another multi-award-winner, Jan Troell's Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow.

And that was also unfortunate for Kim Bodnia, a stage actor taking his first major screen role as stocky, tattooed Frankie, a middle-ranking dealer with an attitude problem and a girlfriend who's a whore keeping her heart of gold open for him. He has a loyal best friend too, Tonny, played with dazzling flair by then-young Mads (Casino Royale, After the Wedding, Clash of the Titans) Mikkelsen, sporting a bald head with the word Respect tattooed on it.

Day by captioned day, the docudrama-style plot and hand-held cameras follow the week of Frankie's progress from carefree contentment to imminent death, while deals are made, go wrong, and lead to gory deaths and mutilation. Refn's Copenhagen is a low-lit, shadowy city that feels as if it belongs in a black-and-white and very noir thriller.

Refn had no training (having abandoned film school after a month, when he gained the funds to transform his projected short into this feature), but his father was a Danish film director and his mother a cinematographer. Childhood environment probably counted for more than genes did, as with the offspring of many other entertainment industry professionals.

Intriguingly, Pusher was remade in 2010, with the same title, as a Hindi-language production set in the UK. Even more amazingly, it's now been re-made again in English as a low-budget British production due for release in 2012; its cast includes Buric reprising his role as Milo.

The finest flattery for the film came from Refn himself. After the failure of his Fear X English-language feature bankrupted his production company, Refn hurriedly wrote and directed two further Pusher drug-dealing thrillers to capitalise on his first film's commercial success. The first sequel (2004) focused on Tonny (Pusher 2: With Blood on my Hands), for which Mikkelsen collected a handful of Best Actor awards; the next (2005) on Milo (Pusher III: I'm The Angel of Death).