A Taste of Hunger left us almost replete. Read why in our review down below:
A Taste of Hunger Review:
Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau goes from fighting in a fantasy war to portraying an ambitious chef and family man, who struggles to keep his career and family goals in unison, in the upcoming danish drama A Taste of Hunger.
Christoffer Boe’s newest feature film combines a family drama with the tropes of an “ambitious man trying to rise in his job” kind of film relatively smoothly. While it chooses the easiest way to do that, which basically means, that the film starts off exploring Carsten’s (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) ambitions and then pauses that, to focus on the family drama aspect of the story, in which Maggi (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) becomes the film’s protagonist. That progression happens slowly, as even with a runtime of just 104 minutes the film takes its time with its slow pacing, but never loses the focus on its characters, who are the heart and selling point of A Taste of Hunger.
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Another highlight are the scenes involving the actual cooking, as director Christoffer Boe and editors Janus Billeskov Jansen and My Thordal came up with some interesting framing choices that made those scenes especially fun to watch. Sadly, those scenes only really take place at the beginning of the film, as the actual plot of Carsten being a chef and managing his restaurant gets sidelined pretty fast, until it becomes replaceable, as at some point in the film the characters jobs, don’t really have an effect on anything whatsoever.
The story also goes to places I didn’t expect, maybe because some of them felt kind of out of place or incoherent with the rest of the film, yet those scenes helped to further establish conflicts and to set the stage for the direction the film would go. I wish the film would have had a bit more teeth, that it would go a bit further with its characters and stories. While the story works well as it is, there have been quite a few opportunities to go even further and it’s a bit of a bummer, that Boe didn’t use those.
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But overall, I did like most of Boe’s newest directorial effort A Taste of Hunger. It spins a captivating story around our main character’s conflicts and while this leads to some events, that don’t completely fit in the tone of the film, there never are any longer periods of time, in which I wasn’t hooked. While it could have used another course in its menu, A Taste of Hunger left me mostly replete.
2,5/5
A Taste of Hunger hits theatres and VOD on January 28, 2022.
It is co-written and directed by Christoffer Boe and stars: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Katrine Greis-Rosenthal, Flora Augusta, Charlie Gustafsson and Nicolas Bro.
What do you guys think? Are you planning to watch it? Let’s discuss everything in the comments down below and on our Social Media.
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