A group of unhinged
Women turn on each other in a by-the-numbers Danish drama written and directed by men
Depressingly, this Danish psychological thriller resurrects some pretty outdated sexist stereotypes with a quartet of emotionally manipulative, unsisterly and two-timing female characters. It comes to us from a trio of men: director Jesper W Nielsen and a script by Christian Torpe, who adapts Christian Jungersen’s bestselling novel about four women working at a small NGO investigating genocide. When they begin to receive death threats, their suspicions turn on each other – and the film plays with the possibility that inside each of them may lurk a crazy psycho bitch.
Danica Curcic plays Iben, an earnest researcher who was recently held hostage in Kenya by terrorists. Back in Copenhagen she is experiencing PTSD, at night seeing the child soldier who guarded her, a gentle, soulful-looking boy. Iben works at the NGO with her best friend Malene (Amanda Collin), a beautiful, complicated woman who shows cruel disregard for other people’s feelings. With the team administrator Camilla (Lene Maria Christensen) they snidely gang up on the new librarian Anne-Lise (Sidse Babett Knudsen). It’s Iben who gets the first threatening email. Everyone assumes the sender is a Serbian war criminal – but might it be Anne-Lise?