‘Sons’ Review: Sidse Babett Knudsen Is Remarkable as an Avenging Corrections Officer in a Plausibility-Challenged Drama

Danish director Gustav Moller’s claustrophobic last feature, The Guilty, starred Jakob Cedergren as a police officer working the dispatch line, fielding calls from a victim, a suspect and many others, all the while holding the screen on his own. The movie so impressed actor Jake Gyllenhaal that he produced and starred in an English-language remake, directed by Antoine Fuqua, that skillfully transitioned the location from Copenhagen to Los Angeles.

But it’s hard to imagine that anyone could take the plot of Moller’s latest, Sons (Vogter), and relocate it easily to an American setting given the particulars. That’s because in Moller’s tense thriller, the drama revolves around a female correctional officer, Eva (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who works in an all-male prison, even on the maximum-security wing — a situation that’s not uncommon in liberal Denmark, but would be extremely rare in the U.S. Indeed, non-Scandinavian viewers may struggle to wrap their heads around how such a situation works in a practical sense.

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Unfortunately, that’s the least of this film’s problems, because while it’s evident that the filmmakers did their research into the procedures and processes of prison life, there is a much more fundamental logical hole here that makes it harder to take the whole thing seriously. Basically, the engine of the plot hinges on the fact that Eva became a prison officer because her own son was sent to prison for a fairly minor offense and ended up getting killed by another inmate.

She has always tried to be kind and fair to the men she guards, but when the young man who actually killed her son, Mikkel (Sebastian Bull), is assigned to the very wing she works on, she becomes obsessed with exacting revenge. Now, I’m no expert on Human Resources procedure in the Danish penal system, but it seems to me extraordinarily unlikely that no one would be making sure a staff-prisoner overlap like this didn’t happen.

Viewers need to just accept or ignore that such an outrageously stupid procedural FUBAR like this could occur in real life — which is also never explained away in the script by Moller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen — to get on with taking the film seriously. Personally, this plausibility problem undermined my engagement with the film throughout, the mental equivalent of chipping a tooth on the first course of a meal. The flaw rather demotes the film from the serious study of crime and punishment and the thin line between guilt and rage it wants to be, and turns it into another classy-looking, immaculately performed, coincidence-driven melodrama, much like the ones the Danes used to churn out by the meter in the early 2000s. (See, for example, Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts or Annette K. Olesen’s In Your Hands, the latter also set in a prison.)

Sons has the same sort of strengths and weaknesses. Like the aforementioned, it’s beautifully shot, rendered in a palette of concrete gray and navy that matches the prison characters’ mostly pasty, sun-deprived skin and Babett Knudsen’s limpid blue eyes. She is remarkable as a woman knotted with anger, regret, fury and ultimately kindness, emotions you can see flickering across her face even as she tries to look as impassive as possible.

Moller plays an interesting game of hide-and-seek-the-character-motivation, teasing out first the revelation of the connection between Eva and Mikkel and then how she will act on it. And there’s something almost cheering in the way the film, in its resolute way, acknowledges that women can be just as violent, cruel and scummy as men.

Moller clearly also has a thing about institutions and how they shape those they contain, visible not just here and in The Guilty but also in his debut short, In Darkness, which unfolded in a mental hospital. It’s a shame that the sloppiness of the script here — the sort of thing that could easily have been fixed in pre-production — lets down what could have been a very compelling, eminently remake-able conceit.