Film Reviews

In A Better World

• Rating:
• Director: Suzanne Bier
• Starring: Markus Rygaard
• Details: Denmark / 119mins (15A).

Winner of Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, Suzanne Bier (After The Wedding, Brothers) returns to Denmark after the American outing Things We Lost In The Fire but sticks with her typical themes: exploration of family relations. The performances are flawless and the subject is tackled with earnest but it could have done without the lecture.
Schoolboy Elias (Rygaard) has it tough: his mother Marianne (Dyrholm) is divorcing his father Anton (Persbrandt), a doctor who spends most of his time in African refugee camp. If that wasn't hard enough, Elias has to put up with a school bully who, because Elias has braces, has everyone calling him 'rat face'. Enter Christian (Johnk Nielsen), a hard-as-nails kid who has shut down whatever compassion and patience he had when his mother died of cancer, a horrible death he erroneously blames on his father (Ulrich Thomsen, Festen). Christian befriends Elias and teaches him to stand up to bullies. However, Christian takes it too far…
Surprisingly in a film such as this, In A Better World doesn't climax with Elias and Christian overcoming a bully - that's just the jump off point - which gives the sometimes engrossing drama time to explore what happens when the weak, the picked on, decide not to take it anymore and how society deals with such matters. Society - personified by Elias' school and his father Anton - deal with bullying in different ways. The school's limp reaction is to force the bully and the bullied to shake hands, while Anton deals with a different kind of bullying in Africa where a warlord bets on the sex of unborn babies and isn't prepared to wait until birth to find out. Back home, Anton runs into a boorish mechanic and refuses to react when repeatedly slapped across the face. Anton believes that he is stronger for not reacting, but Christian disagrees: the bully doesn't care you're not afraid and will continue to harm you until you fight back.
Christian's character is by far and away the most interesting on show. Played deftly by William Johnk Nielsen, who seems to be channelling a little of The Omen II's Jonathan Scott-Taylor dead-behind-the-eyes shtick, Christian exists in a world of pain and rage. He engages in his own kind of bullying - emotional abuse: his father is distraught with the cutting comments from his son. Nielsen's portrayal borders on the scary. But this isn't just a 'bullying is bad, mkay?' theme. Bier gets under the fingernails of the fallout of pain and loss, too, and explores the idea that to overcome the bully you must be worse than them. But in doing so where does that leave us? There's a lot to mull over here.
However, In A Better World sticks around far too long after wrapping everything up and, more importantly, what Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen don't address is that if you defeat the bully, the bully just comes back the next day with friends. Big friends.

Review by Gavin Burke