A War

As the title per­haps sug­gests, at some basic lev­el all wars are the same. Men kill each oth­er, their wives suf­fer at home, chil­dren cry. While this Afghan con­flict dra­ma unfolds, giv­ing us a Dan­ish POV on the per­ils of the front­line and the chal­lenges of the Copen­hagen home front, that sense of gener­ic samey­ness how­ev­er, does rather kick in. And not to the film’s advan­tage either.

The knuck­le bit­ing ten­sion which writer/​director Tobias Lind­holm and his decen­cy-exud­ing lead­ing man Pilou Asbæk care­ful­ly built up togeth­er in their pre­vi­ous Soma­li pirate thriller A Hijack­ing whipped up expec­ta­tions that they’d deliv­er some­thing pret­ty spe­cial here, yet it feels like a movie we’ve seen before. TV news cov­er­age, vérité docs like Restre­po and even the potent British indie flick Kaja­ki have all served to ren­der the lives of West­ern troops tread­ing war­i­ly in fear of the Tal­iban fair­ly famil­iar on-screen territory.

Lindholm’s per­sis­tent, obser­va­tion­al cam­era and his instinct for visu­al authen­tic­i­ty do keep it all watch­ably real, but as incom­ing fire, IED car­nage and tricky nego­ti­a­tions with scep­ti­cal locals put com­pas­sion­ate Asbæk’s com­mand skills to the test, there’s not much here to rock us on our heels. Mean­while, back home with three mis­be­hav­ing kids, it’s under­stand­able his oth­er half Tuva Novot­ny is look­ing pret­ty frayed, but her striv­ings are of a dif­fer­ent order of inten­si­ty from the chal­lenges faced by ship­ping com­pa­ny exec Soren Malling in A Hijack­ing, mak­ing life-and-death deci­sions on the phone to trig­ger-hap­py Soma­li warlords.

Still, just when you think you’ve got a han­dle on where the movie’s going, there’s a knock on the door and every­thing changes. Unfair to say any­thing more than that, but the revised sce­nario in which Asbæk now finds him­self caus­es him – and indeed the rest of us – to work back through all the deci­sions he’d made in the movie’s open­ing salvos, par­tic­u­lar­ly his deal­ing with an Afghan fam­i­ly who’d come to him for help after the Tal­iban had spot­ted them in con­ver­sa­tion with the Dan­ish contingent.

Sud­den­ly, the movie shifts up a cou­ple of gears, becom­ing more com­plex and involv­ing and tak­ing us to places we nev­er expect­ed to go. There’s now a key role for the steely Malling, as Asbæk’s can­ny guide through the moral mine­field now sur­round­ing him, and the full extent of Lindholm’s nar­ra­tive agen­da at last comes to light. As a film­mak­er he’s ter­rif­ic at ren­der­ing the frac­tious tex­tures of demand­ing per­son­al expe­ri­ence, yet he’s ulti­mate­ly inter­est­ed in the wider issues – here laid out like con­cen­tric rings of respon­si­bil­i­ty, from the indi­vid­ual, to the fam­i­ly unit, thence to the state itself.

What comes across is an appar­ent rest­less­ness in Den­mark about the stan­dards of con­duct expect­ed of their own per­son­nel while the Tal­iban con­duct war­fare on their own ruth­less terms. As the haunt­ing final image leaves us to pon­der, it’s one thing to hon­our the courage of our mil­i­tary in no-win sit­u­a­tions, but shouldn’t we also be ques­tion­ing the whys and where­fore of the polit­i­cal deci­sions which put them there in the first place?