Stellan Skarsgård plays a man whose attention has been more focused on his career than his family wrestles with accepting his wife’s terminal illness
Here is an intelligent and civilised film from Norway with two outstanding actors; directed by Maria Sødahl, it’s about love, grief and intimacy and it is conceived at a high creative standard. Yet for me it never quite ignites with the real passion or the real anger that it seems to be gesturing towards.
Andrea Bræin Hovig plays Anja, a successful fortysomething choreographer with an international career, in a relationship with Tomas, played by Stellan Skarsgård, and together they have a large and loving stepfamily. The previous
Christmas, Anja had been given the all-clear from lung
cancer, but one year on it has grimly returned with a metastasis in her brain; she has to have surgery but with a poor prognosis.