‘Sons’ Review: Playing a Prison Guard With a Dark Secret, ‘Borgen’ Star Sidse Babett Knudsen Uncages Her Inner Animal
23.02.2024 - 02:53
/ variety.com
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Movie buffs may recognize the name Gustav Möller because his debut feature, “The Guilty,” played Sundance, then went on to inspire an English-language remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The film famously took place on one end of an emergency services line, as an overcommitted police officer tried to rescue a distressed caller whose crisis wasn’t nearly as straightforward as it sounded.
An impressive example of creativity within constraints, “The Guilty” invited audiences to make an action movie in their heads while giving them little more than the tense face of a single character to look at for most of its running time. With “Sons,” Möller has made a more conventional film, but still does most of his storytelling off-screen.
His protagonist is a Danish corrections officer named Eva Hansen (Sidse Babett Knudsen, star of the “Borgen” TV series). She’s half the size of most of the male prisoners on her ward, but can obviously hold her own, swelling her shoulders and raising her voice as needed when the men step out of line.
In the film’s opening scenes, before the plot kicks in, Möller shows Eva making an extra effort toward her charges — not to compensate for being a woman in a male jail, but because she cares. She shows an almost maternal instinct in attempting to educate and anger-manage the inmates, which makes sense later, when we learn that her 19-year-old son died behind bars.
It’s the kind of irony that makes for great movie characters: Eva feels she dropped the ball in raising Simon (whose entire backstory is left to the audience’s imagination), and now she pays forward the attention she should have given him, hoping that it might save some other mother’s son. But “Sons” is not a
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