IN A BETTER WORLD

One of the few Best Foreign Language film Oscar winners worthy of the prize Susanne Bier's IN A BETTER WORLD is a beautifully made, narratively complex and deeply moving work dealing with issues of family and relationships on a very broad canvas, (it moves between two continents). It's also one of the great films about childhood, (both boys are superb; William Johnk Nielsen as the violent and disturbed young Christian and Markus Rygaard as his more pacifist friend Elias giving two of the finest child performances I've ever seen). I suppose you could say that fundamentally it begins as a study about the relationship between fathers and sons and the friendship between boys before developing into a much darker study on the nature of violence both on a simple domestic level and on an international scale. It's a film that grips you from the start and never lets go. As Elias' parents, a Swedish doctor unable to deal with the ethical issues facing him both as a parent and a professional and his wife, also a doctor, Mikael Persbrandt and Trine Dyrholm are terrific. Certainly not an easy watch, I admit, but essential viewing nevertheless.