Copenhagen Cowboy

It’s a surprisingly easy watch, the plotting is fairly accessible and rarely confusing, and despite its visual choices feeling more elementary than complex, they’re always effective.

It’s difficult to imagine casual Netflix subscribers taking to Refn’s unbridled-Id thriller, but fans of the unpredictable, the bizarre, and the deviant will be delighted to see the streamer investing so heavily in the auteur’s flights of phantasmagoric fancy.

While I appreciated many elements — particularly the look and surreal vibe — “Cowboy” moseys a little too slow for my tastes. That said, Winding Refn is a true original.

Moment to moment, Copenhagen Cowboy offers plenty of pleasures: the cool of its taciturn hero, the romance of a brokenhearted gangster figure, the wicked thrill of impending violence, the beauty of one particularly vivid shade of cobalt. Added together, though, they amount to a greatest-hits compilation of Refn’s earlier works, rather than a singular statement in its own right.

Miu’s supernatural origin story really only solidifies in the final episode, by which time some viewers will have lost patience with the narrative’s glacial tread and aura of self-love. If you stick with it, consenting to be mesmerised if also baffled, be warned that Copenhagen Cowboy is like many other supernatural odysseys which get lost in their own maze.

Refn’s active disdain for the rhythms of serial television comes across in the loose string of actions that could be liberally defined as a plot, engrossing on paper and near-interminable in practice.

Refn spreads out his sensory overload, giving all the brooding and brashness ample space to breathe. It can be repetitive, yes, but never monotonous. ... But, at the end of the day, this is NWR for NWR-heads.

Not only does Refn’s new Netflix series check all the auteur’s signature boxes — searing neon light, near-silent protagonist, synth-heavy Cliff Martinez score — while revisiting plots, scenes, and even shots from his feature films (“Only God Forgives” and “The Neon Demon” feel particularly consequential), but it’s so slow to develop, so obtuse, and so open-ended, the first season doesn’t feel like a season at all; it feels like a pilot.

Miu feels very much an extension of NWR’s plagued hero, with the director himself labeling her a “female evolution” of his until then very male archetype. And if one is ever so inclined to indulge the filmmaker’s predilection for the self-congratulatory, then “Copenhagen Cowboy” will work a treat. If the opposite is true, then buckle up, as this is about to be one wild yet extremely unpleasant ride.