Hævnen (Susanne Bier, 2010)

Winner of the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, In a Better World sees director Bier continue in the furrow of meditations on love and loss, most eloquently expressed to date in 2006's After the Wedding. A bereaved father moves to a small Danish town with his 12-year-old son. The boy carries stores of anger looking for an outlet and sets upon punishing bullies, at school and beyond, dragging a schoolmate victim in his wake. His reluctant accomplice has worries of his own besides being victimised for being Swedish: his parents are divorcing and his father, an aid doctor in an unspecified war-torn African country, is often out of reach and his pacifist attitude perplexing to the boys when he is actually present.
The bare bones of the story are thus fairly conventional: prepubescents coming to terms with the adult world as the adults come to terms with their past failings. Further watering down the brew is the third-world refugee camp parallelling, which smacks of woolly tokenism. But on the firmer soil of the families in Denmark, it does work. The appeal of the film is all in the execution: the direction is sensitive, the photography lustrous and the performances, particularly those of William Jøhnk Nielsen as the railing young avenger and Mikael Persbrandt as the conflicted doctor, several shades above mere role requirements.

7/10