Mark Reviews Movies: INTO THE DARKNESS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 20, 2021

Into the Darkness begins with a lavish anniversary party interrupted by the German invasion of Denmark. It's 1940, and the country is about to become more or less a puppet state, under its own parliamentary rule, technically, but a local government of not much use, since there's a hostile and occupying force ready to take over at any moment.

The focus of Flemming Quist Møller and director Anders Refn's screenplay is on a single family—an industrialist patriarch, his wife, and their assorted children. The movie wants to be an epic on an intimate scale, examining how each member of the family reacts to and evolves over the course of the occupation. Most of them come to collaborate with Nazi Germany, either directly or indirectly, for a variety of reasons—business, honor, love. One gradually gains the courage to fight, also for a variety of reasons—a devotion to liberal democracy, yes, but also to spite his father and elder half-brother, as well as the fact that he finds one of the local Communist insurgents to be quite fetching.

In other words, the story is more wartime melodrama than historical drama or political character study. It's all about the big moments—the arguments, the fights, the shootouts, the schemes.

There is a frank, depressing honesty to the way so many of the members of this family become complicit in the German war machine and, hence, the Nazis' atrocities. Their respective slides are on account of naïveté, an engrained sense of nobility, or needing to keep a business running—not only for the good of one's family and the workers, but also out of misplaced pride.

The movie builds and builds all of these escalating internal and interpersonal pressures, and then, for some unknowable reason, it simply ends without a single resolution or reckoning. The filmmakers' plan, apparently, is to create a trilogy of movies out of this story. If that is the case, they've certainly established quite a lot of conflict and drama for those future installments, but this one definitely suffers for that forward-looking goal.

The Skov family has prospered on account of the business acumen of Karl (Jesper Christensen), the clan's patriarch, who runs a factory that manufactures electronics parts. We meet the rest of the family, as well as some other players whose roles essentially amount to historical exposition, as Karl and his wife Eva (Bodil Jørgensen) celebrate 25 years of marriage. Aksel (Mads Reuther) is the eldest of the couple's children, an intelligent young man whom Karl wants to take over the business one day. Their only daughter Helene (Sara Viktoria Bjerregaard) is a sheltered teenager without any sort of goal, apparently, beyond marriage. The couple's youngest sons, Knud (Lue Dittmann Støvelbæk) and Valdemar (Sylvester Byder), are aspiring jazz musicians.

Karl also has an older son from a previous marriage, which ended poorly. He's Michael (Gustav Dyekjær Giese), a soldier in the Danish army who resents the German soldiers who arrive, following a fast and decisive attack, but immediately forgets all of that when he meets a German U-boat commander named Willi (Roman Schomburg). The skipper must have an abundance of charm, since he also instantly sweeps Helene off her feet.

The plot, which spans several years into the German occupation, follows Karl, as he tries to keep his company from doing business with the Germans, and Aksel, as he learns about the mounting revolution against the occupying forces through Svend (Cyron Melville), the son of one of the hired help in the Skov mansion, and later Liva (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen), who sets his heart aflutter with her no-nonsense manner. Helene continues her family-disapproved romance with Willi, eventually leading her to learn why the Nazis are a threat. Michael joins a Danish force that is more closely aligned with the Nazis invading and, as he discovers, murderous ways, while Eva worries about a pair of Jewish friends, who come to the family for help immediately after the invasion and are betrayed by the local police, and the two younger sons hang out and play at a night club, which is eventually targeted by the German military.

If it seems as if there is a lot going on here, there is. Møller and Refn never quite find a way to balance all of these characters (There are so many that it's difficult to keep track of them for a while) and these stories, which possess inherently distinct senses of purpose, significance, and basic interest. Karl's constant back-and-forth wavering about getting into business with Germany to some degree becomes repetitive. Michael's alignment with the Nazis is as sudden as his inevitable break from them, and Helene's doomed romance is wholly slight. Every other character here is some degree of expendable to the narrative.

The screenplay does give us a sense of Denmark's gradual fall in the background, as the country's politics, interests, and survival become more entangled with Germany. Into the Darkness, though, is about this family, and that story is too spread-out and shallow to make much of an impact.

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