By Stephanie Bunbury
MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
A WAR
August 4, Hoyts Melbourne Central Cinema 11, 9pm
August 14, Comedy Theatre, 4pm
Anyone who has been sick at home watching midday movies knows what to expect from a good war picture: gunfire, sacrifice, male camaraderie and shots of James Mason looking stoic.
Pilou Asbaek shines in Tobias Lindholm's film A War, screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival. A WAR 03.jpg
Now here is A War, directed by Tobias Lindholm (who also made A Hijacking and co-wrote The Hunt), which takes this familiar genre and shakes it up with a distinctly Danish sense of moral complexity.
Lindholm plunges us into Afghanistan, where conscientious commander Claus Pedersen (the excellent Pilou Asbaek from Game of Thronesand Borgen) makes a split-second decision that will save one of his soldiers but results in the death of 11 civilians, including eight children.
Pedersen, who has three children of his own, is court-martialled, facing four years in prison.
Should he just take the rap for his mistake? Should he lie to get out of it and return to his family? Is he actually even guilty?
Lindholm's patient exploration of this moral quagmire is an object lesson in screenwriting excellence.