“Sons”, the oppressive thriller by Gustav Möller with the impressive Sidse Babett Knudsen

The Danish director returns with a powerful prison film that explores revenge, forgiveness and redemption. “Sons” is a suffocating journey, a physical film.

First, kindness, humanity. Eva, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, all inwardness, has an almost maternal behavior with the prisoners. A prison guard, she ensures the well-being of the people in her care. As if they were her own children. Then, she transforms into a ball of violence, cold with determination. She asks her superiors to transfer her to the most violent unit in the prison. Why? She recognizes Mikkel, a man from her past. Eva then becomes another person. Kindness disappears to make way for implacable and even sadistic vengeance.

After The Guilty, Gustav Möller, who wrote the screenplay for Sidse Babett Knudsen, locks us in a place that humanity seems to have deserted with Sounds, Sang neuf prize at the 4th Reims Crime Film Festival. A physical, claustrophobic, but also psychological confinement.

The Danish director filmed on location in Vridsløselille, a prison near Copenhagen that has been abandoned since 2018. The dilapidated state of the place contributes to making the atmosphere more stifling. Eva therefore undergoes a metamorphosis upon the arrival of Mikkel, her son’s murderer. In contact with him, she will be different. And it is Gustav Möller’s strength to capture all the nuances of the wounded mother’s journey. The director explores revenge, forgiveness and redemption.

Does a convicted person have the right to a second chance? “Every prison holds up a mirror to the society that built it. I feel that this is the case in Denmark and in most European countries for that matter… We still haven’t decided what model of prisons we want to implement and, by extension, what model of society we want to implement. Are we rational or emotional beings? Do we believe in forgiveness and rehabilitation? Or do we prefer revenge and punishment? At present, the justice system tries to satisfy both approaches, even though they are in total contradiction,” says Gustav Möller.

Beyond the prison system, the director has especially strived to show the heartbreak of a mother, powerful in her fragility, who is losing her footing and who no longer identifies with the person she has become. Sidse Babett Knudsen is impressive in her performance. With an economy of gestures and expressions, she manages to convey all the complexity of her tortured character.

One of the most powerful scenes in the film, and there are several, is undoubtedly the one that brings together Eva, Mikkel and his mother around a table during a family outing of the prisoner. Locked in as in a painting, all prisoners of their suffering, they cannot free themselves from the past, nor communicate. Soundsa powerful, physical film about impossible mourning and the inevitable fight, sometimes against oneself, for forgiveness and freedom.

Gender : Thriller, Drama
Director: Gustav Möller
Actors: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sebastian Bull Sarning, Sarning, Dar Salim
Country : Denmark/Sweden
Duration : 1h40
Exit : July 10, 2024
Distributer : The Diamond Films
Synopsis: Eva, an exemplary prison guard, faces a real dilemma when a young man from her past is transferred to the penitentiary where she works. Without revealing her secret, Eva requests a transfer to the young man’s unit, known as the most violent in the prison.