A War

A War (15)

Denmark 2015  115 mins Subtitles  Dir: Tobias Lindholm Starring: Pilou Asbæk, Tuva Novotny, Dar Salim, Søren Malling, Charlotte Munck, Dulfi Al-Jabouri, Alex Høgh Andersen

Danish writer/director Tobias Lindholm’s almost unbearably tense 2012’s Somali pirate flick A Hijacking proved a fascinating, smaller-scale, hero-free counterpart to Paul Greengrass’s high-profile but no less impressive Captain Phillips. Denmark’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2016 Oscars, Lindholm’s Afghan war drama A War takes a similar approach to its subject, stripping away the pyrotechnics that Hollywood might have deployed to narrow its focus on another flawed man facing an ethical dilemma under extreme stress. Unfortunately, this proves to be a less impressive film than its predecessor, thanks largely to Lindholm’s decision to intercut his protagonist’s battlefield experiences with his family’s domestic traumas back home.

Beardy A Hijacking star Pilou Asbæk, who bears something of a resemblance to the young Ewan McGregor and whose profile has risen as a result of his casting as Euron Greyjoy in Game of Thrones, takes the lead once again as Claus Michael Pederson, the compassionate if by-the-book commanding officer of a Danish unit in Helmand province. Fiercely loyal to his men, he insists on accompanying them on patrol and dutifully parrots the official line that nobody believes about their presence in Afghanistan being to win hearts and minds while protecting civilians from the Taliban. In fact, said civilians are subject to suspicion, occasional hostility and routine humiliating gunpoint searches. Meanwhile back in Denmark, his wife Maria (Novotny) struggles to cope with the couple’s three children. During a particularly intense firefight, Pederson makes a split-second decision that saves the life of one of his soldiers but leads to him winding up in court.

Apart from the suitably chaotic firefight, grippingly filmed using hand-held cameras, this is a measured, pared-back and thoughtful drama with strong ensemble performances. Asbæk is particularly impressive in the courtroom sequences in which Pederson has nowhere to hide from the consequences of his impulsive action as he’s subjected to forensic questioning backed by damning helmetcam evidence. Although Lindholm isn’t afraid to defy liberal expectations, there are no great surprises here. The main problem, however, is that the domestic stuff in the first part of the film not only saps tension from the battlefield sequences but also serves, perhaps unintentionally, to suggest that there is some kind of equivalence between middle class children acting out in a prosperous Scandinavian country and their Middle Eastern counterparts being blown to smithereens as collateral damage.