A War

One of the screenwriters responsible for Borgen, and co-writer of Tomas Vinterberg’s stirring The Hunt, writer-director Tobias Lindholm follows up the stirring A Hijacking with this taut drama.

Imagine you’re leading a small platoon on a typical patrol in Afghanistan. You come across a small settlement where you find a family slaughtered. Suddenly you’re taking fire and your platoon is pinned down on all sides. No one can tell where the enemy is. One of your men is screaming in pain. There’s panic. You have to make a split-second decision. You call in an air strike, which reduces the settlement to rubble. The platoon escape and you get your men back to safety. Job done. The only thing is the air strike wiped out a number of civilians, including eight children, and now you’re asked if you ever had an actual visual on the enemy. Because if you didn’t and you just gave the random coordinates you could be tried for a war crime.

That’s the situation kindly Danish officer Claus Pederson (Asbaek) finds himself in. He only headed up the patrol because the father of the slaughtered family came to beg for help only the previous day; Pederson had ensured the man’s sick daughter was tended to by the company medic and the angered Taliban gave the father a choice: because he accepted aid from the invaders he must join them or his family be killed. Pederson had no choice but to send the family away but promised to return the next day to check in. Dismissed from his duties, Pederson returns home (where wife Novotny is battling her own war, raising their three children on her own) to stand trial.

Asbaek, a regular for Lindholm and who has just been cast in Ghost in the Shell and will play Pontius Pilate in Bekmambetov’s Ben-Hur remake, is simply terrific. In a very unshowy performance, just like his turn in A Hijacking, Asbaek juggles guilt and regret and yet determination not to sell himself down the river and condemn himself to four years in prison, and further time away from his struggling family. This is where A War excels, muddying the waters, seeing things from all sides while exploring morality and superiority.

A War offers no easy answers.