In a better worldPosted by Bentzen Wong on June 9th, 2021 Dramas that don't just leave scratches but deeper marks on the viewer often operate according to the principle of beatings and cleansing: in the end, catharsis is found in suffering the fate of existentially shaken characters. "In a Better World" achieves this effect without excessive brutality, but with the same inexorable character that characterizes other masterpieces of the genre. Susanne Bier stages almost flawless character cinema in a cool and painful way, just as much with regard to the psychological penetration of the characters as well as a meditation on basic human beings knows how to inspire. A crack runs through two young Danish families: Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen) cannot get over his mother's cancer death and, driven by helpless anger, becomes increasingly solitary and withdrawn. Elias (Markus Rygaard), on the other hand, suffers from the separation of his parents and the constant absence of his father Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), who works as a doctor in an African refugee camp for several months. The young friendship of the two outsiders turns out to be a dangerous alliance, because soon their suppressed suffering is directed against the outside world. The director's attention is first and foremost on her characters, whose emotional vicissitudes she records with almost seismographic accuracy. There is hardly an affective detail that escapes her searching gaze. The cast meets her in this regard with a fabulous performance, the entire ensemble acts consistently very credibly and, despite all the drama, never exaggerated. Special praise goes to the two young actors who, in the roles of Christian and Elias, make them forget their age and, for a long time, the camera. As the game progresses, however, it becomes clear that Susanne Bier wants more than to portray individual actors in their individual contexts of life. The initially somewhat irritating sequences that Anton show during his work in the refugee camp are conceptually central: Denmark and Africa should not be delimited in contrast to one another, but rather equated. Generalizing and transnational, the film poses the question of how violence develops. Bestial child murderers cut open the bellies of African girls with knives, and it is with a knife that the escalation of violence among Christian and Elias begins in Denmark. One scene perfectly summarizes this receding of the individual level in favor of a general issue: Anton is standing in his kitchen, surrounded by large panoramic windows in which the outside world is glistening. His serious, thoughtful face is only vaguely visible behind it. It is not the only metaphor that the former dogma director makes use of: Again and again she sprinkles randomly seeming images of nature at pivots of the story, through which the fate of the characters is placed in a broader thought context by using the human dramas shown as Identify essentialist and natural. Violence, the statement said, is as elementary as it is inevitable - so it is terribly "natural". Fortunately, "In a better world" does not stop at this explanatory model, but provides a further cinematic answer to the basic question raised when the cause of violence is the loss of stability in life: Christian only finds enough consolation and comfort in Anton's caring embrace Security to forget your anger. "Sometimes gold movies seems as if there is a veil between you and death," explains Anton, and it actually seems as if Susanne Bier's drama wants to remove this boundary by reducing vulnerability as well as Western pseudo security of life can be felt in every scene. Our world is "the best of all possible worlds" - Leibniz's dictum means that all evil is a necessary part of existence and that good is what makes good possible in the first place - and it is this realization, among other things, that sadly illustrates Susanne Bier's drama. In a better world "therefore names a longing rather than a real possibility. As a viewer you don't want to have any illusions after the film anyway, but rather have the impression of seeing some things more clearly than before despite a good cinematic "beating".
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