Description

Do not miss this hard-hitting masterpiece of urban crime cinema tracing one man’s descent into personal apocalypse over a single day, night and following morning. Pusher 3 opens innocently enough, with a middle-aged family man named Milo (brilliant Croatian actor Zlatko Buric) attending a Narcotics Anonymous-styled support meeting. He faces the table of would-be recovered addicts and explains how difficult it will be to stay away from heroin today, as it’s his daughter’s 25th birthday and he will be cooking for an army of relatives and friends. He vows sobriety to the group. Everyone nods encouragingly. Milo wants nothing more than to stay away from smack. Milo is also one of Copenhagen’s most connected heroin dealers. Immediately after leaving the support group, Milo steps into a drug buy, only to get stuck with copious amounts of ecstasy tablets instead of the dope he’d arranged for. Admittedly clueless when it comes to the newer drugs, Milo agrees to work with middlemen to unload his buy and is almost immediately burned. He owes serious money and can no longer sell to repay into the cycle. Running back and forth between planning his daughter’s birthday and wheeling and dealing for his life, Milo’s every attempt to set things straight backfires into digging an even deeper ditch. A ditch which is looking increasingly like a mass burial plot.

The most crucial thing you need to know is that, like the first sequel, Pusher 3 is an entirely self-standing production that does not require any familiarity with previous entries in the series. Nicolas Winding Refn’s acclaimed trilogy is a series of engrossing explorations of Denmark’s criminal underworld, each film baring relation to the others through peripheral characters who inhabit the same universe. Milo, a deadly recurring character in previous entries, takes centre stage here, revealing himself to be even more vulnerable and afraid than those he circles around. Extraordinary character writing and wholly immersive ensemble performances have always been Refn’s signatures, but Pusher 3 is exceptional even by his standards. Reflecting Denmark’s sometimes troubled cultural melting pot, nearly half the film’s dialogue is in languages other than Danish - Polish, Serbian, Arabic and Albanian. A gritty, violent and above all, honest film that thrives with a humanity (and melancholic sense of humour) as impacting as any of its darker surprises – including a moment of grueling physical violence bound to have many twisting away from the screen - Pusher 3 is one of the most authentic crime dramas since Scorsese’s glory days.

—Mitch Davis

"A nervous, absorbing film that plays like a feature-length version of the paranoia-drenched pasta cooking scene from GOODFELLAS" - Eddie Cockrell, VARIETY

"Refn maintains a keen understanding of the cutthroat economics of the underworld, the many uses of violence and the internal dramas that harm his characters more than any of their competitors can" – Jason Anderson, EYE WEEKLY

Credits

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenplay: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cast: Zlatko Buric, Ilyas Agac, Marinela Dekic, Kujtim Loki, Ramadan Huseini, Slavko Labovic
Producers: Henrik Danstrup, Kenneth D. Plummer, Kim Magnusson, Rupert Preston, Mikkel Berg
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures