The Pusher Trilogy

[Helikaon]

These films aren't about crime, but they are about criminals. I've seen the first two, will be watching the third later on today.

Incredible Danish crime trilogy, started by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive). 

Some of the rawest, realist movies I've seen so far in my life.

Mads Mikkelsen is INCREDIBLE in the first two, and the second film has perhaps my favourite ending in a crime thriller since I first saw The Godfather and Scarface.

Anyone else seen and enjoyed these movies? I feel like I'm going insane trying to tell people about them. Really hoping the trilogy sticks the landing.

[NateDog]

I've had them on my list for a long while, really only because of Mads initially but I have heard good things about 1 and 2 since I first looked into them. Second Sight did a nice release this year, if it sticks around into the new year I may finally pick it up!

[tr0nic]

Ah, Franke!

Finally, someone else I know has seen Pusher and I get to talk about it. I know the feeling of madly trying to convince everyone within pissing distance that Pusher is a trilogy of hidden gems, I recently rambled at a stranger about it the other day.

I initially found the trilogy from a short video essay on YouTube about them about 2 years ago, and I've been obsessed ever since. I haven't been this enamored with a crime film(s) like this since I first watched Heat and Hard Boiled back in high school. There is just nothing else quite like Pusher. It's so grimy. It leaves you feeling unclean. It does such a great job at taking any kind of sexiness out of the crime film or portraying criminals and just leaves it with the trashy, greasy gold chain-wearing gaudiness and nothing else. The criminals in Pusher are not particularly clever or cunning, they're mostly average idiots that just happen to steal things and sell heroin, and barely competently. They're just regular people.

One scene that I think about all the time is this moment in Pusher II where Mads Mikkelsen's character finds out he had a kid with a prostitute he hooked up with before going to jail for 2 years. He's standing in the kitchen in his underwear, and his baby mama is telling him he's a father. He makes a bowl of cereal, and goes over the table she's sitting at and scrapes some leftover heroin off the table and into the cereal very casually and eats it. It's so fucking grimy, and horrible, and bleak, and utterly hilarious all at the same time.

I was reminded very often of Gaspar Noe's films when watching Pusher. The horrific and gut-wrenching tone of 2002's Irreversible has a toned-down cousin in Pusher, for sure. Nicolas Winding Refn and Noe have worked together and exchanged ideas before, and it's clear that Refn has riffed off of Noe in Pusher. All of the skin crawling, visceral, human disgustingness of Noe's work can be seen here. But unlike Irreversible, it's not almost unwatchable.

Pusher II is definitely my favorite out of the 3, although it's almost tied with Pusher III. Mads is just incredible. But making the crime boss the protagonist of the 3rd film, the one who was at the center of all the problems for the last two protagonists, was just a brilliant move. Putting Milo in the same position as Franke and Tonny completely elevates the movie and ties them all together firmly as one big three-part story.

[Helikaon]

I found them through  this fan music video. I already loved the song, and I'm a big Mads fan, so it was a match made in heaven. I bought the DVD of the first film, thinking that was where the scenes in the MV came from, and was just blown away by the grittiness and just... reality, depicted in the film. Like, I know people like Frank and Tonny. I've never been a drug dealer myself, but I've moved through those worlds. This trilogy is one of the most human depictions of that world I've ever seen.

[tr0nic]

I've tried to respond to you four times now but I keep listening to the music video you posted and getting entirely distracted, thanks for the new music it's stuck in my head now.

Anyways yeah, I was very tangential to that world for a bit there and it's incredible how Refn captured people like that. Sometimes they have all the money in the world, but it can be gone in an instant and nothing ever gets better. There's a conversation about the price of ecstasy in Pusher III that I basically witnessed in real life, I was left kind of speechless by the accuracy of it all.

I had discovered Pusher right around the time this small artist I follow released an album that was entirely unlike anything else they had made previously, and I also made a little music video of one of the songs off of it. It's not as elegant as the one you posted, but I wanted to showcase how elegantly Refn does chaotic scenes in these movies, it's damn near perfect.

Spoilers, kind of, for anyone that hasn't scene the first movie yet.

[Helikaon]

Haha, NOTION has that effect on people, I've found. "The Days" reminds me so much of this past summer, I had it on repeat, basically.

Excellent work on the music video, great scene choices!