FILM

Denmark 2010 118 mins Subtitles Dir: Susanne Bier Starring: Mikael Persbrandt, Markus Rygaard, William Johnk Nielson

The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film is always a bit of a lottery. Sometimes those notoriously doddery Academy votes get it right; often they get it hopelessly wrong, as in 2004 when lachrymose disability flick 'The Sea Inside' beat the brilliant 'Downfall'. This year, the outstanding 'Incendies' and agreeably disturbing 'Dogtooth' were runners-up to Susanne Bier's worthy 'In a Better World', which successfully pushes all the appropriate buttons, being a platitudinous morality tale that purports to address big questions but dodges drawing any kind of political conclusion in favour of serving up warm fuzzies. It probably helped that this is a 'foreign-language' film in which a substantial proportion of the dialogue is in English.

It's a film with two intertwining stories, whose parallels are presumably intended to provoke chin-stroking contemplation. In Africa, noble Scandinavian medic Anton (Persbrandt) patches up the victims of a vile warlord known as Big Man, whose hobby is predicting the gender of the offspring of pregnant women and then carving them open to see if he's right. In Denmark, Anton's eldest son Elias (Rygaard) is the victim of school bullies. He then falls under the malign influence of troubled new kid Christian (Nielson), who stabs and beats the crap out of the ringleader. On a visit home, Anton delivers a lesson in turning the other cheek to break cycles of violence, but finds himself dismissed as 'weak' by Christian. Back in Africa, his liberalism is further challenged when injured Big Man turns up at his field hospital demanding treatment. There's nothing wrong with the performances, but the film's smug self-importance proves its undoing, along with its soggy stab at moral equivalence and manipulative last-reel submission to redemptive uplift. (Robin Askew)

Website www.sonyclassics.com/inabetterworld/

Opens Fri 19 Aug

Copyright Robin Askew 2011