Heavy metal doors slamming, bells ringing in the hubbub, the constant ballet of tinkling keys and gut-wrenching screams piercing the few moments of silence... Against a black backdrop, Sons sonically opens the doors of the prison that will become the suffocating stage for tragic events, with almost no way out. We are prisoners for the next two hours.
Gustav Möller' s (The Guilty) latest feature, Sons, presented at the Berlinale and due in cinemas on July 10, 2024, is a stifling huis-clos in a Danish prison. The film follows Eva Hansen(Sidse Babett Knudsen, the unforgettable prime minister in the Borgen series), a prison guard fully committed to her job, when Mikkel(Sebastian Bull Sarning), a young man from her past, arrives at the prison. Eva asks for him to be transferred to the maximum-security ward, the most violent unit in the prison where the inmate has been incarcerated.
From the outset, the film creates a palpable climate of tension, without us immediately understanding the reasons for Eva's disturbance. This is followed by long moments of solitude and Cornelian questioning (forgive or take revenge, go from victim to executioner?) that we share with this heroine in a Hitchcockian bun, filmed from behind in this maze of corridors that she also flies over, in all power and omniscience, thanks to the surveillance cameras.
As the balance of power between the matron and the prisoner is reversed and the revenge becomes more intense, moral values are overturned - those of this empathetic little woman who crosses the red line, and those of the spectators too, ashamed to have found the first reprisals pleasurable before all this went too far.
A face-to-face confrontation in several stages, involving glances, fists, then words, and all that nervousness that finally spews out of the walls, allowing us to breathe away from this suffocating prison, over-framed in every direction by bars and safety glass bubbles, in an image format as square as a cell.
After The Guilty, which sequestered us in a police station, Gustav Möller once again uses (quasi-) huis-clos to put the viewer to the test, leaving him or her emotionally and morally bereft, especially when faced with the stark observation: "We can't save them all" .
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