Review of In a Better World (2010) by Mike M — 21 Aug 2011

Everyone on screen remains just a little too much at the mercy of screenwriters playing God (there's a Skype connection that cuts out just as one character is trying desperately to make himself heard) or some finger-wagging editorial (with the narrative strands tied up within 90 minutes, I spent most of the last half-hour wondering why we were all still there), and yet the performers, unfailingly human and vulnerable with it, kept me watching.

Persbrandt makes intriguing and less than insufferably righteous a character determined to turn the other cheek and fulfil his Hippocratic oath at all points, and young Nielsen is outstanding as a smart kid poised, for reasons good and bad, on the very brink of delinquency - then reverting to the status of scared little boy when the seemingly inevitable comes to pass.

If I were an Academy voter, these last two might have persuaded me to place "In a Better World" second on my ballot, in a fairly uncompetitive category - even if the film in its entirety does feel finally more like an accomplished afterschool special than anything adult enough to merit troubling the trophy cabinet.