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 intocare.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 Policepartner 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.
