At this point, I see Mads Mikkelsen is in a movie, and I put it on my watchlist. I happened across this from the library and added it to my pile to check out. Hadn't heard of it before, didn't care. Was intrigued.
The movie features a little girl named Aurora looking like Wednesday, with her double braids and her deadpan earnestness. She tells her parents that there is a monster under her bed and they should avoid walking on the floor during nighttime hours. She is so spooked by this fixation that she hops from her bed to the windowsill of the apartment and spends the night out on the fire escape with a worry doll, and her special blanket with a tree of embroidered eyes. She wishes on a shooting star that something would get rid of the monster and notices a firefly take an unusual path which highlights a strange man (Mads) in the alley below.
The next morning, she sees the strange man in the apartment lobby getting his mail and decides to observe whether he is the answer to her wish. The following night, she sneaks out the fire escape and follows him on a night's walk to Chinatown, where he confronts some dragon dancers and takes them all out. The girl sees the dragon shadows and determines the strange neighbor is indeed a monster slayer and determines to hire him for her needs.
During the night, Aurora huddles in her bed, as the floorboards shift and she heard the screams of her parents.
The next morning, Aurora, still superstitious about her rule of not touching the floor, uses an ornate copper hippo as a land boat in her apartment, with a hobby horse as a gondola pole for momentum. She checks her parents' room and finds it full of fluffy feathers and destroyed furniture, with both of them disappeared.
At this point, I, as an audience member am fully confused and excited. I get a weird little girl, beautiful camera work with an action fight sequence in Chinatown, and wonderfully whimsical sets and wardrobe. And of course Mads Mikkelsen.
But the next scene is a musical church sequence of a choir clapping and singing down the aisles for a collection plate. At the end of an aisle seat, Aurora decides to make off with her row's collection plate, making a custom envelope with construction paper to offer the Lord's money to the mailbox of the stranger across the hall to be her salvation from the monster.
Mads's character is bemused by this handwritten request and reads it by lamp in his apartment, where the switch turns on a light in a taxidermied chicken's butt. He soon has to answer the door for Aurora following up on her request to hire him. He is skeptical of her story and asks why she thinks he will be able to help? And she replies with full confidence that she saw what he did in Chinatown.
This is a problem for the mysterious Mads whose neighbor character never has a name. He happens to be a career hitman and he does not need this attention in the apartment, or otherwise in his discretionary career. He is aware that something is going on with his small neighbor across the hall, but he assumes that her parents' disappearance might be related to his kind of work where the contract misidentified the apartment number. Does he feel some responsibility? Maybe, but that is a hazard, and not enough for him to decide to extend that guilt to assume responsibility for the daily wellbeing of Aurora, whose name he can't even get correctly with his dutch accent.
Honestly, I had a marvelous time with this film. I was even more delighted as the credits rolled and I saw that it was indeed a Bryan Fuller directed project with a screenwriting credit. Fuller worked with Mads before in Hannibal, where I first got a taste of that European man's ability to steal a scene with his physical aura. And Fuller is responsible for my favorite TV series in "Pushing Daisies". He is able to blend whimsy with threat, with excellent use of colors and music to accent scenes and swerve deftly between genres. He is a master of bright cheery scenes and darker menace and tension. This has elements of Leon the Professional without the French lens of "What is a hitman doing with a literal child? This is a lot to process and explain." While there is also a lot to unpack here, the threats in this film are handled with such a deftness, that feels so specifically tailored to my wheelhouse of delight and wonder instead of suspicion and worry.
