Meet Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen)—married father of two, crime scene photographer, suburbanite, owner of a beater car that works one minute and stalls the next. His wife Mette (Charlotte Fich) rallies for a new car. Jonas knows they cannot afford it. Following a car accident, Jonas takes a mistaken identity moment and runs with it, discovering a passionate new life for which he’s pined.
Jonas goes to visit the stranger Julia (Rebecka Hemse) at the hospital. She is near death following the wreck. When Jonas is mistaken for her boyfriend, Sebastian, he is unable to tell the truth. As her family begs him not to give up on her, they rally around her and become acquainted with “Sebastian,” the boyfriend they have only heard about. Julia comes to. She is blind and has amnesia. She gets to know Jonas’s version of Sebastian and falls in love, not remembering right away that she may have killed the real Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas).
Backstory is told via flashbacks. There are odd secondary characters. Jonas’s friends, Frank (Dejan Cukic) and Poul (Karsten Jansfort) are idiots. Poul laughs all the time, mostly at inappropriate moments. Frank has the same expression regardless of what is happening. Then, there’s Doctor Dichmann (Flemming Enevold), over the top in all his reactions. He deserves his own film but seems badly cast here.
(Spoiler Alert: Read at Your Own Risk!)
The real Sebastian returns and the movie comes to life. Hemse’s Julia isn’t compelling enough to carry the story. By the end, her pained expressions and convulsions are tiresome. The supermarket scene where Jonas breaks up with his wife feels genuinely pained. Overall, the movie is slow. It has its noir elements, but the proportions don’t fit gracefully together.
Writer/Director: Ole Bornedal
Country: Denmark
Genre: Thriller
Run time: 100
Scale: 2.5
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