“The Promised Land” is a “troubles on the farm” thriller, with a lone stoic battling the elements, greedy nobles and the sandy, infertile soil itself in an effort to tame the place and make his fortune.

It’s “Places in the Heart,” “The Southerner” and “Shane” in Danish, with iconic Danish star Mads Mikkelsen as the stubborn army captain who will not be uprooted, even if the land literally repels those roots.

Danish novelist Ida Jessen imagined uninhabited 18th century Jutland, a vast, sandy and under-inhabited heath in the western third of her homeland, as Denmark’s Old West for her historical novel “The Captain and Anna Barbara.”

Director Nikolaj Arcel recovers from the debacle of “The Dark Tower” to give us a beautiful but unsentimental genre picture with all the elements of the formula for such films served in their proper doses.

Mikkelsen plays Captain Ludvig von Kahlen, perhaps the bastard son of a nobleman who spent his life fighting for the German army. In the 1750s, he’s returned to Denmark after 25 years of service, seeking an audience with the king because he has some notion of making Frederik V’s fondest wish come true.

An army surveyor raised by a gardener, he will settle the infertile sandscape of Jutland, start a colony there of German farmers, and make it pay off.

“All soil can be cultivated,” he declares (in Danish with English subtitles). And he won’t listen to the huffing of bureaucrats and nobles who insist “better men than you have tried and failed.”

He rides out alone, takes core sample after core sample to try and find some patch that will support a crop. He then builds his “King’s House” on The King’s Land, and hires a couple of runaway serfs (Amanda Collin and Morten Hee Andersen) to make his start.

But there’s a sinister, titled fop who claims that land. And as he’s inherited not just an estate, but a judgeship in the region, Frederik de Schickel (Simon Bennebjerg) is ideally placed to stop the “bastard” son from succeeding.

The way de Schickel freely admits he added the “de” to his name to sound more royal and insults the poverty, uniform and everything else about the captain suggests the depth of his fear and resentment of this man who would be his social equal if he pulls this feat off.

Essentially, Bennebjerg has the Alan Rickman/Richard E. Grant role in this parable. He’s hatefully good in the part, playing a sadist who rapes servants and has been bribed to marry his Norwegian cousin (Kristine Kujath Thorp) to keep all the money in that gene line.

Denmarks’s official submission for Best International Feature in the 96th Academy Awards even gives us a “tater,” a “darkling,” the smart-mouthed Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg) who runs with the thieving bands who roam the moors as an outlaw class. The captain takes her in, reluctantly, after she leads him to her clan, which he hopes to turn into a workforce.

But being dark skinned, she is “bad luck” to the Germanic Danes he wants to help him colonize this forbidding land.

Mikkelsen is well-cast as the guarded man of few words single-mindedly-pursuing land and the “set for life” noble title that he feels are his due.

“God put man on Earth to make civilization,” he tells the local priest (Gustav Lindh), his only ally. With the king’s backing, he is sure of success. But de Schickel is the law here, and the unreachable, alcoholic (it is suggested) king has no idea he exists.

Still, Kahlen refuses to take Schickel’s bait, won’t be goaded into fighting Schickel’s hired army officer goon (Olaf Højgaard) and resists the temptations of the unhappy cousin who has no interest in marrying the sadistic Schickel, whom the captain refuses to address as “de Schickel.”

But as sabotage is added to the myriad other challenges our intrepid frontiersman/farmer faces, as blood is shed and indignities pile up, we know a reckoning is coming.

The narrative sticks closely enough to historical events to feel believable and realistic. The setting is striking and the period detail ensures that we’re immersed in this hardscrabble world where being sentimnental about a goat, a woman or a child is a luxury our grim hero can ill afford.

It won’t hold many surprises for anyone who’s ever seen a Western or a movie Alan Rickman sneered his way through. But “The Promised Land,” with its themes of futilely fighting a “rigged” system to change one’s status, with dubious rewards even if you win, makes a most worthy saga, even without the sagebrush.

Rating: R, bloody violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Amanda Collin, Gustav Lindh, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Melina Hagberg and
Simon Bennebjerg

Credits: Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, scripted by Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel, based on the novel by Ida Jessen. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:07