The Danish Woman

The Righteous Terror of Ditte Jensen

Screenwriting 101 says you should "save the cat" early if you want an audience on your protagonist's side. Benedikt Erlingsson clearly skipped that lecture. At the start of his 2025 series *The Danish Woman*, Ditte Jensen (Trine Dyrholm) is outside her Reykjavík apartment tending to freshly planted carrots when a neighbor's cat chooses the flowerbed as its litter box. Ditte does not wave it off. She puts a violent, permanent stop to the problem. It's shocking, alienating, and almost perversely effective. I was horrified. I also couldn't stop watching.



Ditte is a retired Danish Secret Service operative who supposedly came to Iceland for a quieter life, but she approaches civilian retirement like deep-cover work in hostile territory. Erlingsson, who previously made the terrific *Woman at War*, has a clear weakness for battle-scarred oddballs. Here he points that instinct at the small agonies of apartment living: noisy neighbors, stupid feuds, abusive ex-boyfriends. Then he lets a black-ops assassin handle them. Ditte insists everyone speak flawless Danish to her, which of course they do not, and she answers suburban irritation with military-grade force. The show lives in a deeply strange space between satire and vigilantism. Her methods are appalling. Then, against your better judgment, you catch yourself thinking: *Well, that guy really did deserve a beating.*



The six-episode run only works because Dyrholm is that good. After years of playing women who keep whole storms locked behind the eyes, she lets something wild break through here. She holds herself with the stiff control of a coiled spring, crossing the frame like a tank dressed for errands. Erlingsson keeps puncturing that tension by making her burst into song and dance without warning. (Dyrholm's real-life musical background, which once nearly took her to Eurovision, gets used here to wonderfully surreal effect). The collision of savage violence and sudden choreography is completely deranged in the best way. The supporting cast helps keep the madness grounded, especially Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as an oblivious alcoholic neighbor who tries to bond with a Libyan refugee by comparing war trauma to theater drama.



*Le Figaro* called the series "a marvel of Nordic black comedy," and that feels right to me, even if the show's slippery morality occasionally threatens to throw the whole thing off balance. It's tiring, strange, and oddly cleansing. *The Danish Woman* has no interest in making Ditte lovable, and it certainly doesn't beg forgiveness on her behalf. It just makes you stand there and witness the damage. Whether she reads as a nightmare neighbor or a badly broken angel of justice mostly depends on how much collateral damage you're willing to stomach.