All too often my movie diet consists of serious narrative films and documentaries where I am intent on learning something. I take too few opportunities to just watch a film which requires little piecing together of plot elements or where I can just sit back and immerse myself in the world of the story without taking copious notes on the cinematography. Having said this, I am pleased to say that watching Vikaren (The Substitute) was pure fun.
This Dutch film by director Ole Bornedal reminded me of The Goonies with its young protagonists who find something rotten about their new substitute teacher. The opening prologue tells us that we earthlings are not alone in the universe but that what makes us unique is our ability to feel empathy and to love one another. However, there is another race out there who live in a Hobbesian world of constant war and they send a metal orb to Earth to do a little reconnoitering. It lands at a chicken farm and proceeds to inhabit the body of the farmer's wife. The wife is reborn as Ulla Harms who becomes the substitute teacher. The main protagonist of the class is Carl. Carl's mother recently died in a car accident and he is in the process of moving forward with his life.
The kids find Ulla to be very strange and eventually learn that she is an alien. In classic horror movie fashion, their attempts to convince their parents of the situation fall on deaf ears.
Paprika Steen plays Ulla and she is marvelous throughout. The confidence with which she holds herself and her array of facial expressions endow Ulla with an eerie sense of menace that is always lurking just beneath the surface. A lot of people behind the camera also contributed to the creepy atmosphere of the film. There's a wonderful shot in the beginning with the camera at one end of the aisle between the rows of chicken cages on the farm. A line of fluorescent lights hovers overhead flickering. You have all these symmetrical lines in a grey room with our view constantly lapsing into darkness – a great shot. Although this is a sci-fi movie with an alien, there's very little CGI and this works to the film's advantage by placing the emphasis on Ulla.
If I've made Vikaren out to be a serious horror-thriller, don't be fooled. It's actually very funny as well as being suspenseful. The kids' parents' gullibility is comical and Carl's interminably cute younger sister provides humor with her pleas for their father to find love again. The gore of Ulla eating a live chicken is defused by placing the camera behind her and instead showing her head shrouded in a flurry of feathers.
Vikaren reminds me of a fairy tale. Not the emasculated versions of Disney, but the original stories collected by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. For instance, there's a scene where Ulla shrinks someone down to just a couple inches in size and pops the helpless figure into her mouth. And I suppose Bruno Bettelheim would point out that the kids are on the cusp of being teenagers and that their relationships with their parents here mirrors the process of growing up. The kids' disagreements with their parents and their breaking into Ulla's house to investigate are akin to the rebellion and the move towards independence that is part & parcel of being a teenager. But I'll leave such speculation to fans of Bettelheim.
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