Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) is a Company Commander in the Danish Army who has been sent to one of the roughest places in Afghanistan to carry out missions there and try to keep the peace while the Taliban do their worst. He is much-respected by his men, but by being thousands of miles from home he is neglecting his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) and three young children, the middle one having started to act up and make his mother's life far more stressful than she really needs, especially with a husband absent for so long. But is her emotional pain comparable to Claus's when he is faced with seeing his men placed in mortal danger, including one who today has been killed in action?
A War, or Krigen as it was known in its native Denmark, was the film director Tobias Lindholm followed up his internationally acclaimed suspense drama A Hijacking with and was well enough thought of to be submitted by his nation for consideration by the Oscars for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. But while it received plaudits from some quarters, others pointed out that it was a step down from his previous effort which had been so strong, whereas this, taking the same low key approach, wound up being less intellectually stimulating and more moody and unexciting. Even with the occasional scenes of the company under fire, the actual action was muted otherwise.
Not helping was that this gradually - incrementally, you could say - built up to tackle a moral dilemma that turned out in the latter stages when it was expected to be resolved to be fumbled badly with a very convenient for the plot contrivance of an extra item of evidence that you had to assume was an outright lie, effectively letting Lindholm of the hook of the issues he raised but was unwilling to weigh up fairly. Most of the second half was taken up with a courtroom drama where the activities of Claus in Afghanistan were called into serious question, though not apparently serious enough for the audience to be given the bare facts and allowed to make up their own minds about whether Claus was acting reasonably or not; you didn't necessarily wish to see him punished, however.
That was thanks to all those scenes beforehand showing what a great guy he was, stacking the deck considerably when if the character had more nuance it would have been a richer drama. Indeed, so purer than pure was Claus that when the prosecution came up with some very valid reasons for him to be sentenced rather harshly for what might have been a mistake, but also could have been demonstrably vindictive, the film was happy to dismiss them since he was a good husband and father and those kids needed a rock solid guardian in their lives which their weak-willed mother was not providing. The whole enterprise spoke to a false dilemma when Lindholm as screenwriter refused to face up to the thorny issues he purported to consider.
In fact, every time the opportunity to really contemplate something grave and fundamental about the process of war and having to shoot and blow up people in the name of peace arose, this fell back on the sentimental option every time, which may well have been an undeniable element of why war occurs, but you wanted a clearer picture of what was a very murky set of situations, especially in the Middle Eastern conflicts where contradictory news stories about the successes and failures erupted every week. Lindholm concentrated on the effect this had on children, so we see the mites injured, then killed, by combat, a rather blatant tug at the heartstrings that seemed unethical when it served as a distraction from answering the dreadful consequences of all this bloodshed in global terms this didn't seem interested in other than paying a little lip service. When Claus's toddler son accidentally swallows pills to contrast with the dead kids all that distance away, it felt like a cynical move in a work that would probably be more contentious if it hadn't been so dull. Music by Sune Wagner.
