Before you go into fits of apoplexy thinking that this is a review of the Tom Berenger film from 1996, rest assured that this The Substitute is a Danish film by director Ole Bornedal that just happens to have the same name (it’s Vikaren in Denmark). Fantastic Fest does choose their films with a bit more taste, although they are both about hard-assed subtitute teachers. One of them just happens to be an alien, and sadly we don’t mean Tom Berenger. Although that might have improved that movie.
In this Danish film, Paprika Steen plays a chicken farmer’s wife who gets inhabited by a spark of light from a planet far away. Her alien races lives without love, and she’s been sent as an envoy to try and find out what it is so that her race will stop destroying one another. Sounds noble enough, it’s just too bad she’d rather kill people and eat chickens whole than stay on course.
In the opening scenes of the movie, a narrator describes the problems with the alien planet while the pulsing dot of light that is our protagonist travels through a wormhole and onto Earth, where it takes over Paprika’s body. The scene then switches to an interview with an author of a book wondering if man can live without love. When he’s asked “Do you love anyone?” the camera pushes in on the screen, and we’re flashing back to young schoolboy Carl and his mother in the car, arguing about the length of his hair. One car crash later, and Carl and his father are struggling through life without her.
As moody Carl deals with things in school during sessions with counselor Claus (who looks a lot like Moby), his pal Albert continually tries to stick up for him against the onslaught of the two school bullies who owe much to Crabbe and Goyle from the Harry Potter movies. An awkward new girl, Rikke, is introduced to the students, moments before they get a substitute teacher… the aforementioned alien-inhabited farmwife. Inexplicably, she’s now become a subtitute teacher in what is the biggest logic leap the director wants you to make.
The kids are instantly suspicious of her vast knowledge and creepy mannerisms, and they begin trying unravel the mystery of who she is. Of course as always happens in these films, they find out and the parents don’t believe them. Despite a full-fledged confession from the kids at a meeting of the parents, they decide to send the kids on a school trip to Paris with the substitute and Carl’s father. There’s a one-night stopover at the chicken farm from the beginning of the film, and that’s where everything really unravels.
The film is well-photographed and has spectacular performances from all of the child actors, but it’s Paprika’s eerily sublime substitute who really sells this movie. Her alien mannerisms and plastered-on smile are chilling, despite the fact that there’s not a lot of violence in this movie, unless you count death to chickens. Ulrich Thomsen played her husband in Kristian Levring’s Fear Me Not at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and he does a good job as Carl’s disconnected father. The actor who plays Carl, Jonas Wandscheider, is bound to grace the covers of the Danish edition of Tiger Beat… if such a thing exists.
While there will probably be inevitable comparisons to The Faculty, which does have a few decent moments, this movie is more comedic, and is a bit more chilling. The scene where Ulla (Paprika) reveals herself to Carl at dinner is worth the ticket alone. The Substitute (Vikaren) comes out on DVD on October 14th.
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