Let’s talk an interesting little Danish indie flick whose premiere I had the good luck to check out not too long ago—one that I found speaking to me a lot more than I thought it would. Maybe it’s just themes that happened to be what I’ve had on the head a lot, but beyond that, I certainly enjoyed the style and approach on offer here with Søren Peter Langkjær Bojsen’s The Great Glitch—or possibly Children of Paradise.
Our main focus is one young friends Ronja (Joos Støvelbæk) and Serb (Lukas Gregory) drifting around modern day Copenhagen. Between uncertainty on the future, indulging in weird playlists on Youtube, and existentationlist questions possibly aided with herbal help…it’s a not exactly unfamiliar millennial/Gen-Z experience that soon takes a take for the weirder with ‘glitches’ in the essence of reality. And not long after meeting young lady played by Leonora Saabye, things get weirder still when Ronja intertwines himself with an activist network with a rather mycelial theme.
There’s a dreamlike atmosphere throughout, with an ambling pace to go with it—the directors drew comparisons to Chungking Express and Big Lebowski, which I can certainly see. I’ve always enjoyed those sorts of slightly surreal imagery of city streets and the life within them, especially in those moments at dusk or night—and it does well at painting an image of Copenhagen beyond the landmarks and tourist sights.
And this all serves well to match the ever-weirder feel of the narrative—characters who may be slipping between realities, with new faces who insist they look like Nancy from Stranger Things, or mysterious pursuers who all may or may be figments of mushroom-tasting imaginations. It’s feelings of confusion and loosening grips on reality that hit harder at home for some.
Then again, it all ultimately comes down to themes of reconnection—and what affecting actual social change may be. As one of the characters earlier in the film muses, change doesn’t always come for the better, or sometimes merely replaces something with a different kind of ill—so what better than a different route altogether? In today’s age, when many bouts of activism feel…debatable in what they achieve, it all feels like certainly something to ponder on.
And that’s what all comes together for the end credits—which you should without a doubt stay for, and are in fact arguably the highlight of the whole thing.
Beyond the enjoyably trippy atmosphere, there’s the real message that sometimes, in new and uncertain times, there’s nothing more appropriate than thinking outside the box. And that, for me, is something that the world could certainly use more of.
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