Heavy metal doors slamming, doorbells ringing in the hubbub, the constant ballet of tinkling keys and gut-wrenching screams piercing the few moments of silence... Against a black backdrop, Sons sonically opens the doors of the prison that will become the suffocating stage for tragic events, with almost no way out. We are prisoners for the next two hours.
Gustav Möller' s (The Guilty) latest feature, Sons, presented at the Berlinale and due in cinemas on July 10, 2024, is a stifling behind-the-scenes look at a Danish prison. The film follows Eva Hansen(Sidse Babett Knudsen, the unforgettable prime minister of the Borgen series), a prison guard fully committed to her job, when Mikkel(Sebastian Bull Sarning), a young man from her past, arrives at the prison. Eva asks to be transferred to the high-security section, the most violent part of the prison where the inmate has been incarcerated.
Right from the start, the film creates a palpable climate of tension, without us immediately understanding the reasons for Eva's turmoil. This is followed by long moments of solitude and Cornelian questioning (forgive or take revenge, go from victim to executioner?) that we share with this heroine in a Hitchcockian bun, filmed from behind in this maze of corridors that she also flies over, in all power and omniscience, thanks to the surveillance cameras.
As the balance of power between the matron and the prisoner is reversed, and the vengeance becomes more intense, moral values are overturned - those of this empathetic little woman who crosses the red line, and those of the spectators too, ashamed to have found the first reprisals pleasurable before all this went too far.
A face-to-face confrontation in several stages, involving glances, fists, words and all that nervousness that finally spews out of the walls, allowing us to breathe away from this suffocating prison, over-framed in every direction by bars and safety glass bubbles, in an image format as square as a cell.
After The Guilty, which sequestered us in a police station, Gustav Möller once again uses the (almost) closed-door setting to put the viewer through the wringer, leaving him emotionally and morally bereft, especially when faced with the stark observation that "we can't save them all".
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