A Taste of Hunger (M, 104mins) Directed by Christoffer Boe ***½
Former Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays a top-class chef in this engrossing (and mouthwatering) Danish tale of unbridled ambition, marital infidelity and Michelin stars.
His Carsten and wife Maggie (a magnificent Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) have worked hard to build their restaurant Malus up to becoming a well-regarded eaterie.
While he displays the same attention, dedication and passion towards his marriage as he does to everything in the kitchen, she believes that “you can’t just have hopes and dreams, you also have to have a little fun”, encouraging him to deconstruct his latest dish, so the diners can enjoy playing with their food, as well as eating it.
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Former Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays a top-class chef in an engrossing (and mouthwatering) Danish tale of unbridled ambition, marital infidelity and Michelin stars.
But as they desperately try to secure the global recognition that will ensure more financial stability, a potential revelation seems set to tear them apart. Just as a solo diner, who could well be the “mystery guest” who could deliver them the industry approval they need, arrives, a letter comes for Carsten saying Maggie loves someone else.
She initially intercepts it, however, she’ll have to go to increasingly desperate lengths to stop the message from ruining everything.
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Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Katrine Greis-Rosenthal, A Taste of Hunger is filled with simmering emotions, shock revelations and nuanced characters.
A must for food porn fans and lovers of thought-provoking, tension-filled relationship-focused tales, it perhaps comes as no surprise that director Christoffer Boe’s co-writer is none other than Another Round, Borgen and The Hunt scribe Tobias Lindholm. This bears all the same well-crafted hallmarks – simmering emotions, shock revelations and nuanced characters – of those award-winning Danish dramas.
Boe makes great use of his restaurant kitchen, inner-city apartment and forest foraging settings, each evoking their own mood and tone, while there’s something for everyone in terms of culinary creations to get the hunger pangs up to full intensity.
If there’s a fault, it’s in the fractured storytelling, which, while dividing the drama into chapters that reflect its culinary setting and the ups and downs of a partnership (Sweet, Sour, Fat, Heat), actually has the effect of the cooling off the narrative, just as it is starting to really boil over into something gripping. It also means we come back to the main action a touch cold, losing a little of the impact of a final, gut-wrenching twist.
In Danish with English subtitles, A Taste of Hunger is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.
