A Danish Western anyone? With The Salvation, director Kristian Levring has successfully created an unlikely, thrilling new genre, harnessing together the lean, dirty-faced shootouts, chases and lawlessness of Clint Eastwood’s westerns in particular with highly stylised visuals and a back story that suggests a reimagining of how the west was civilised by old world settlers.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Jon, a Danish ex-soldier turned frontiersman who meets his wife and son from the old country after years of separation spent establishing himself in a ranch near Black Creek.
As they travel to the ranch, they’re joined on the stagecoach by a drunken outlaw and his sidekick, and all hell breaks loose, setting off acts of revenge upon revenge which bring Jon into direct confrontation with a sadistic local gang leader named Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).