Film Review: In A Better World (Hævnen)

As my pal and I entered our local cinema, its floors swept with popcorn and chairs shamelessly half-empty, we hadn’t any clue what the film we were about to see actually detailed. Not the best way to start a film (nor a review for that matter), but the viewing was really, really gripping; a visual feat, and a thought-provoking piece about the extent of one’s morality. Set predominantly in an unnamed industrial Danish town, permeated with scenes in the Sudan, 2010′s In A Better World, is a compelling story centred on vengeance and its role in resolution. On paper it looks about as appetizing as a plateful of sild, but Susanne Bier’s important drama makes for powerful cinema: exploring the destructiveness of youth – by the fiery actions of the guideless Christian – and adults alike – by his friend’s father when intervening in a playground fight between two children. He got a punch in the face for his troubles. Metaphor and an equal measure of Nordic themes are not unfamiliar to this piece; ideas of punishment and redemption, commitment to a higher cause, all course themselves through the narrative – albeit unsubtly at times. The most obvious being the [...]