Credits: screenplay: Kristian Levring, Anders Thomas Jensen; director of photography: Jens Schlosser; editor: Pernille Bech Christensen; sound: Mick Raaschou; production design: Jette Lehmann; costume design: Helle Nielsen; producer: Sisse Graum Jorgensen; production: Zentropa;

Country: Denmark

Year: 2008

Running time: 95

Colour: Colour

Format: 35 mm

Among Danish director Kristian Levring's considerable assets in this stunning psychological horror film is Ulrich Thomsen (CELEBRATION), one of the cinema's finest actors. Ingenuously withholding energy, he portrays Mikael, a bourgeois family man whose psyche begins to unravel, possibly from new antidepressants-much like James Mason's character in Nicolas Ray's “Bigger Than Life”, who took too much cortisone and nearly sacrificed his son. Mikael's unpredictable actions, especially against his wife and daughter, defy codes of civilized behavior. This is classic return of the repressed, the surfacing of some childhood trauma. Jens Schlosser does a fine job photographing the family in their open glass house and punctuates Mikael's mental fragmentation with lovely shots of nature at its most tranquil. (H. F.)