DAnish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev, director of the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo starring Noomi Rapace, has written movingly about the true story behind his very personal new film. It is inspired by his sister who has schizophrenia, perhaps brought on by heartbreak she experienced in her personal life as a teenager working in France on her gap year, but who in middle age went on a cathartic healing journey back to that country with her sister and brother in law.
Sofie Gråbol (star of the Scandi noir TV hit The Killing) plays a fictional version: Inger has schizophrenia and lives in a care home; she is about to take a bus trip to France with her caring, if nervous, sister Ellen (Lene Maria Christensen) and Ellen’s optimistic, good-natured husband Vagn (Anders W Berthelsen). It is a tense experience, because Inger still talks openly about the invisible being called ‘Goldensun’, who speaks to her and encourages her to harm herself, and also because she also has a habit of making loud, sexually inappropriate comments, until the tense feeling. and callous disapproval of a mean man on the bus who would rather not be around this person. But this man’s sweet twelve-year-old son, who is inevitably more innocently compassionate, befriends Inger.
Unfortunately, the film is saddled with syrupy liberal good taste, and watching Gråbøl’s elaborate impersonation of someone with schizophrenia, panicking a bad person on the bus… well, it’s impossible not to think of Lars von Trier’s 1999 satire The Idiots, about an anarcho-situationist prank cult of people who pretend to have cerebral palsy in public places to confront and inconvenience the caring citizenry. Although the film is based on a true story, the characterization and story of this film are massaged into a kind of sentimental drama. It sounds false.