Tobias Lindholm—whose gripping thriller A Hijacking (2012) detailed tense negotiations between Somali pirates and Danish shipping executives over a stolen vessel—brings his exacting, clinical approach to this tale of Danish military forces in Afghanistan. Like the earlier film, this one is divided between two distinct worlds with different power dynamics: for the first half, Lindholm cuts from a company commander (Pilou Asbaek), stationed in Helmand province and charged with protecting innocent Afghanis from the Taliban, to his wife (Tuva Novotny), worrying about him and struggling to care for their small children. Only in the second half, after the commander is accused of a war crime and returns home to stand trial, do these two worlds merge and their respective realities clash, with sobering results. In Danish with subtiutles.
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