It’s only the ‘goodies’ that get a second chance in
this new rather overwrought melodrama from Danish Oscar winning director
Susanne Bier as the ‘baddies’ evidently do not deserve to dig themselves out of
the hell holes of lives they have ended up with. The action starts with Police Detective
Andreas and his partner Simon bursting into a squalid apartment to arrest
Tristan on drug charges when they discover a distraught crying baby lying in
his own excrement. A horrified Andreas tries to get the Authorities involved,
but Social Services claim that is still not enough cause to have him taken into
care.
Meanwhile at Andreas own rather idyllic lakeside house
that seems like something right out of the pages of Elle Décor, his wife Anne who
is suffering from a serious strain of post-partum depression and is trying to
cope with their own baby who seems to never stop crying. On yet another restless night Andreas wakes
up to the sound of Anne screaming her head off as she cannot get baby Alexander
to wake up. She refuses to accept that
he is dead and in her hysterical state tells Andreas that if he takes the baby
away, then she will kill herself. After
he gets her sedated and back to bed he drives off with the baby’s body to the
hospital to do the right thing. However
somewhere along the way he comes up with the crazy idea of breaking into
Tristan’s apartment and swapping Sofus his baby with dead Alexander.
Just when you are taken in and thinking that as unorthodox
and immoral as this is, it maybe the best chance for poor neglected Sofus as
obviously his drug-addled mother is not a fit person to be a mother, there is a
sharp twist in the plot that surprises us …. and Andreas …. as after all, nice middle-class Anne is
even worse. It’s inevitable that Andreas is not going to get away with this
audacious far-fetched scheme but he is relying on the fact that his Police
partner Simon is a serious alcoholic and his judgment is befuddled when he is
under the influence. Also he believes
that Tristan and his girlfriend Sanne have such little regard for baby Sofus
that they will not even notice that he has been swapped.
Ms. Bier forsakes any hint of subtlety and lays on the
drama very heavy handedly, and milks it even further with eerie nighttime shots
of the mist over the lake accompanied by doom-laden music that tips you off
that more tragedy is just around the corner.
The movie’s saving grace is its cast led by the rather dashing Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau ( Jaime Lannister in
‘Game of Thrones’) back to his Danish roots as Andreas the father too perfect
for his own good, and Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the lowlife Tristan.
The only one who comes out
well from all this is Sofus who lives happily ever after with his mother who in
the end, turned out to be the one who really did warrant that second chance.
★★★★★
★★★★★
