'Sons' Review: Prison-Set Psychological Thriller Is Mental Warfare at Its Best | Subtitle 2024 (2024)

After competing at the Berlinale Film Festival for the Golden Bear, Gustav Möller’s psychological crime thriller, Sons (Vogter in Danish) deserves recognition far beyond the European festival circuit. What may attract North American audiences is that Möller’s debut feature, The Guilty (Den skyldige in Danish) a one-location thriller following a night in the life of a 911 responder, was remade for Netflix starring Jake Gyllenhaal. In just two movies, Möller has established himself as a confident filmmaker specializing in stories of law enforcement corruption and the complexity of human morality. Sons isn’t a hard look at police brutality; it may be a central theme but Möller is more focused on how grief, loss, and hatred can make someone so vulnerable to corruption and to having their values and morals destroyed.

'Son's Is a Tense, Prison-Set Psychological Thriller

(Sidse Babett Knudsen) Eva is a prison guard in Denmark, serving in one of the tamer blocks with prisoners who are the least likely to become violent. She refers to every prisoner by their first name, she rarely has to resort to physical restraining to keep them in check, and she helps to train them in cooking and school. She seems content, and Möller right away presents a prison system that looks like Disneyland compared to North American cinema. Establishing Eva’s fulfillment in seeing the prisoners not just behave but go through rehabilitation sets the path for her ultimate descent into destruction.

What kicks this off is the arrival of a new prisoner, Mikkel (Sebastian Bull). What no one else in the prison knows is that he is the man who brutally stabbed Eva’s son five years prior when they were both imprisoned in a different location. Eva, who we understand is a moral, upstanding employee, starts to show cracks in her ethics when she decides to keep the information to herself and requests a transfer to Central Zero, the prison’s highest security block in which Mikkel is kept.

What follows is tense, suspenseful psychological warfare between the two. Mikkel grows increasingly volatile when E va starts exploiting her position of power by withholding cigarettes from Mikkel, depriving him of going to the toilet, and other microaggressions that she can easily conceal. But it’s not long before Eva can’t contain herself from exorcising all her pent-up pain and anger on the person she believes deserves it. What we witness is a complete dismantling of Eva’s sense of self, as she goes from a committed proponent of peaceful rehabilitation and offering people second chances to reveling in the slow mental torture of Mikkel.

Eva and Mikkel’s Morality Becomes Progressively Muddled

Many movies claim to operate in morally grey areas but by the end-credits, there’s a hero and villain wrapped in a bow. Here, Möller offers no easy convictions. Eva, as our protagonist, earns our favor immediately. It’s heartwarming to see a representation of prison with its intended use — to rehabilitate those who’ve committed crimes so they can, one day, re-enter society as better people. But for both the audience and Eva, this optimism is promptly shattered as we enter Central Zero. Mikkel is immediately easy to hate as he’s unpredictably volatile and we’re conditioned to feel exactly what our protagonist does — nothing but deep hatred towards him. But as Eva starts to unravel and lose all sense of her professional ethics, it becomes a tennis match with the audience in the middle. Möller has us constantly going back and forth between the two, and the line between hero and villain is not just blurred but completely twisted.

Despite Möller going beyond the one-shot location format of his first movie, he keeps his shots tight and gripped throughout Sons. It adeptly creates the claustrophobic atmosphere that naturally comes with prison dramas, but it also works to shove the audience in tight with these characters, despite us feeling more wary of them as the runtime unfolds. In some of the most emotional or dramatic moments of the movie, Möller will only let us look at Eva from the side, constantly masking her full range of emotions to keep audiences at arms’ length. This sort of intentional separation between her and the audience allows more room for the ideas around morality to ruminate. Möller doesn’t judge his subjects or try to steer audiences towards some form of conclusion — we are just asked to witness the destruction that grief can cause. What Möller is doing here more than anything is tearing down the glory of revenge.

Prison reform and corruption are certainly on stage here, but the most pronounced and well-handled throughline is “What if revenge makes you just as bad as who you’re exacting it on?” Despite Mikkel being a cold-blooded murderer and Eva being the grieving mother, Möller offers no easy binaries, resulting in nuanced and unrelenting portraits of human morality. And, of course, the movie’s title represents how bringing a child into the world is both a blessing and a curse. Parallel to Mikkel’s relationship with his mother, Möller and co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen examine the moral dilemmas that come with being a parent. It’s clear that Eva does have a firm moral center, but if anything is going to corrupt that, it’s going to be the person who took your child away from you. The movie looks beyond the criminal and examines the ripple effect of one person’s actions across their loved ones.

'Son's Script and Direction Are Elevated by Sidse Babett Knudsen and Sebastian Bull's Performances

The movie doesn’t take any break from Sidse Babett Knudsen and she never falters under the suffocating intensity of the entire film. It’s in her subtitles that we can track the breakdown of everything she stands for. Without ever needing to explicitly mention her son, the ease with which she is willing to throw her principles out the window just to spit in Mikkel’s food tells us everything we need to know about this woman and how her son’s death has affected her. Knudsen walks a tightrope between the grieving mother that should easily draw our sympathy and a woman who is as just as morally corrupted as those she’s employed to discipline.

Matching this careful precision is Sebastian Bull as Mikkel. Much like with Knudsen’s performance, he plays Mikkel as an obviously troubled, volatile man, but we still can’t help but feel for him as Ava slowly tortures him. It poses many questions regarding police authority, how we should treat the most dangerous in society, and where the line between corruption and discipline lies. All these bigger ideas are compounded into a two-hander, with both players landing every volley.

With just two movies under his belt, Gustav Möller has announced himself as a filmmaker who can craft a compelling, gripping thriller while illustrating the darkest parts of human morality. With two razor-sharp performances that are able to draw out the nuanced subtleties of the script, Sons is one of the most affecting and electrifying thrillers of the past several years.

Sons screened at this year's Subtitle Film Festival.

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Sons

Sons is a gripping prison-set psychological thriller that examines the consequences of exacting revenge.

Pros

• Sidse Babett Knudsen and Sebastian Bull have tense chemistry that adds to the suspenseful atmosphere.
• Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen's script packs tons of nuanced commentary on a multitude of topics.
• The movie does not try to categorize the characters by right and wrong, letting the complexity of their morals play out.