Toomas Beneath the Valley of the Wild Wolves
2019 · 18m · Croatia
Directed by Chintis Lundgren
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A young wolf, jobless, secretly works as a gigolo while his pregnant wife attends a female-empowerment seminar involving male slaves.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise so deliberately unhinged—pregnant wife at an empowerment seminar while the husband hustles as a gigolo—that it feels like Lundgren made it specifically to make consensus critics squirm. The absurdist tonal whiplash between dark comedy and real domestic anxiety is exactly the kind of subversive move most scouts would hedge on, and that's precisely why it works.
Lundgren situates this in a lineage of provocative Scandinavian cinema that interrogates gender and labor, though the film's tonal balance between satire and genuine pathos requires considerable formal precision to avoid collapsing into mere provocation.
The central formal gambit—maintaining genuine tenderness toward Toomas while the premise itself is deliberately ridiculous—hinges on a single sustained performance choice that refuses to wink at the audience, and that restraint is what transforms what could be shallow satire into something genuinely unsettling.