In Your Hands Movie Review:


Director Olesen (Minor Mishaps) uses the Dogme Manifesto to its strongest effect with this raw and naturalistic prison drama. Freed from prison movie cliches, she gets the chance to explore much more emotional territory in this look into the nature of faith.

Anna (Jorgensen) is a newly trained priest who gets a job in a women's prison, where everything seems fairly low-key. An ex-junkie (Richter) volunteers to assist her, then tells her about a new inmate, Kate (Dyrholm), who she believes has a miraculous gift of healing. Kate is also noticed by the prison counsellor Henrik (Kopernikus), who's tempted to begin an illicit relationship. And then she comments that Anna is pregnant, which can't be possible since Anna and her husband (Ranthe) have been trying for years.

Like most Dogme films, the purely unadorned filmmaking style makes it feel like we're watching a documentary. The performances are intimate and extremely authentic, with bursts of intense emotion and lots of internal struggling, especially as the story takes a few nasty turns for each character. As a result, we are drawn in emotionally to each person's agonising dilemma, and as their brains begin to spin for a solution, so do ours. The fascinating wrinkle here is the faith each person has in God, the people around them and the system they live in.

It's rare to see a film that deals so provocatively and so deeply with this idea. Religion is such a taboo subject in films that when someone actually grapples with complex spiritual questions on screen it feels almost alien. But Olesen and Aakeson tackle it head-on, really digging into the psychology of their characters to figure out how each would react in each situation. And the result is powerfully moving and insightful, mostly because none of them seem to do what we would do in the same situation! This is thoughtful, gripping, introspective filmmaking with a strong sense of character and story.



Rich Cline

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