A pompous, contrived, schematic high school special
Allow me, if you will, to wonder at a bit of length how this movie got both the Globe and Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It is quite terrible. The movie is a Danish version of Crash but with violence instead of racism. What I mean is that the characters and the story are so far removed from real life that the film becomees a long thesis statement on the history of violence. The characters are not real human beings but sociological arguments. What happens when your mother dies from cancer? You become a psychopath. What if your parents are divorced? You get bullied. Then, by coincidence (there are quite a bit of those) you meet another lost soul. And then your father just happens to get into the world's most implausible street fight, but good thing, because you just happened to do some violence yourself and now it's on everybody's mind. It's like fate which in this case was the director assigned you, your friend and your parents the topic of violence as a term paper. And luckily, your father is also dealing with his own violence in his job.
In science, you go where the evidence leads you. You don't make the evidence fit a predetermined conclusion. This is what the film did. It is overly determined, schematic, programmed. It wanted to make a grand statement about violence and forgiveness and manipulated it's characters like so many chess pieces. Nothing was organic, borne of character instead of heavy handed theme. It told, in a rather didactic way rather than showed. And the symbolism was about as subtle as a bag of bricks. Look a man struggling with what to do sees a spiderweb. Birds fly free in contrast to the frustrated mortals who have to deal with themselves. Forgiveness and rejuvination are illustrated by a windmill. This is not a movie; it's a badly written parable.
The African scenes bothered me. I know the filmmakers are not bigots, but here we have violence as a part of daily life in Africa, while the European characters step on the precipice of acting that way. It read as Europeans, better be careful in what you do or else you'll devolve into Africans and their violent states. Because a shorthand for barbarity is Africa.
I did like Bier's visual sense. There are some shots here like the doctor sitting in the yard that were painterly. The acting by all was pretty good, especially by the boy who played Christian. But the movie told you what to think and feel in so bald, and unnatural fashion that it just failed.