The bodybuilder Kim Kold doesn’t loom over the world of “Teddy Bear,” a low-key Danish drama about saying hello to love and goodbye to dear old, horrible Mom, he towers. As Dennis, the movie’s emphatically noncuddly title character, Mr. Kold has a diffident manner that appears at odds with his outrageous physical size and his character’s expert exhibitionism. A hulking contradiction tucked under a stratum of ropy muscle, his Dennis is at once massive and passive, as big as a house and shy as a mouse. He needs to roar.

First he needs to deal with his mother, Ingrid (Elsebeth Steentoft), a wisp of a woman with sharp features and a bitter affect. A tiny, proud beauty, Ingrid lords over the small, drab house she shares with Dennis, her only child. The two live in a colorless quarter outside of Copenhagen, but they also bicker and overshare in that realm known as the contemporary art film, at that junction where lives of quiet desperation meet the cinema of sobriety. By this I don’t mean that anyone is a teetotaler in “Teddy Bear,” though Dennis’s breakfast slurry of nuked nutritional powder and egg whites is punishingly spartan. It’s only to say that the movie’s no-frills realism derives from common aesthetic strategies like hand-held cinematography and nonprofessional acting.

Directed by Mads Matthiesen from a schematic screenplay by him and Martin Pieter Zandvliet, “Teddy Bear” is a largely likable tale about a 38-year-old man-child trying finally to grow up. When the movie opens, Dennis is having a nightmarish presumptive first date with a bored chick who listlessly picks at him and her food. Dennis explains that he’s a professional bodybuilder, but that he has to work in security to pay the bills. From the way he hides out for a spell in the men’s room, his heavy head listing toward the sink as if he were about to retch, it seems obvious that this isn’t his first lousy match. He brings to mind an Easter Island statue teetering and nearly toppling.

There’s more to Dennis than initially appears, and, through a series of small narrative turns, he manages to shake off the Danish dreariness — he pries away from Mom’s viselike clutches with a lie about a bodybuilding competition in Germany — for the welcoming sun and embracing nights of Thailand. He makes the trip on the recommendation of another relative, his Uncle Bent (Allan Mogensen), who has suggested, with rather hilarious understatement, that it’s easier to meet women in Thailand. Guided by hope and a handful of glossy brochures, Dennis arrives in Pattaya on the east coast of Thailand, where he soon makes his way to a bar. There he is greeted by the proprietor, Scott (David Winters), who quickly asks Dennis what he likes in women, breast size included.