Movie Review: In A Better World

DUAL ROLE: Mikeal Persbrandt plays a doctor working in Africa, while his family life falls apart in Denmark. Photo / Supplied

After her unprepossessing Hollywood debut, Things We Lost In The Fire, Danish director Bier goes back to her roots - the intense and emotionally literate ensemble dramas with which she made her name.

Like Open Hearts, After the Wedding and Brothers (badly remade with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal), this was written by Anders Thomas Jensen, one of the most distinctive voices in European screenwriting.

And like those films it is a thinking person's soap opera - a movie that finds the most absorbing drama in the collision of human frailties.

Writer, director and ensemble are in top form again, though the film as a whole is somewhat weighed down by its baggage. More than is common in a Bier movie, we're aware of an overarching theme - in this case whether pacifism is viable in a world full of violence or evil - and it leaves an uncomfortably didactic impression.

But if the film - known as Revenge in Danish and Civilization in the US - is the most schematic of the Bier/Jensen oeuvre so far, it is held aloft by performances of enormous clarity and conviction, in particular from its youngsters.

Anton (Persbrandt) is a doctor who spends much of his year working at a refugee camp in a part of Sudan ruled by murderous warlords. But the cost to his own family is high: his marriage to Marianne (Dyrholm) is melting down for several reasons and his older son, Elias (Rygaard), is relentlessly bullied at school.

Elias makes friends with new arrival Christian (Nielsen) and his father Claus (Thomsen), who are bearing grief of their own. When Christian sorts out the bullies' ringleader, he sets up a chain of events that has unexpected and horrifying consequences.

The characteristically intimate camerawork takes us close into the characters' faces and inner lives and the acting for the most part is beyond praise.

But the subplot that develops in Africa delivers us a pantomime villain and detracts from rather than adding to the dramatic dilemma the film is trying to develop at home. And the ending suggests that life is more complex and compromised than kids realise, which is doubtless true, but it's dramatically deflating.

Not Bier's best, but a class act nonetheless.

LOWDOWN

Rating: 3.5/5
Cast: Mikael Persbrandt, Trine Dyrholm, Ulrich Thomsen, Markus Rygaard, William Johnk Nielsen
Director: Susanne Bier
Running time: 113 mins
Rating: R16 (contains violence and content that may disturb). In Danish with English subtitles
Verdict: Soap opera for thinking people.

-TimeOut