Brothers

Brothers is an immensely harsh film. It does have a little disarming humour, but it is the surprisingly cruel and brutal scenes that stay in the memory.

At the start of the film, big brother Michael picks up his younger brother Jannik outside the prison where Jannik has served a sentence for robbery. They drive home to Michael's lovely wife Sarah and his two girls. The brothers' parents are also present at dinner that evening, where they are both to celebrate Jannik's release and say goodbye to Michael, who as a major in the army is to be part of the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan the terrible happens: Michael's helicopter is shot down. He is presumed dead, but in reality he has been taken prisoner. He survives, but not without cost. Meanwhile Jannik has become a great support for Sarah and the best uncle ever for the girls, so is there any room at all for the deeply traumatised Michael when he returns home?

Brothers is not entirely clear in its aim. On the one hand the film is a love-triangle drama in which the brothers slowly swap roles, including in their relationship with Sarah. Where Michael used to be the calm, sensible family man, he has suddenly become aggressive and unbalanced, while the younger brother Jannik develops from being the family's black sheep into the one you can rely on. On the other hand the film is a story about the horrors of war and what it does to us. Susanne Bier does, however, more or less succeed in combining the two stories and two vastly different worlds by both linking and contrasting the everyday humdrum of Copenhagen and the mercilessness of war in Afghanistan.

The film tips over into melodrama at the end, which mars the realism emphasised by the Dogme-like camerawork and grainy images, but the overall impression is nevertheless of a relevant and powerful drama.