Troubled Water – DeUnsynlige (2008)

Directed by: Erik Poppe | 115 minutes | drama | Actors: Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, Trine Dyrholm, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Trond Espen Seim

Jan Thomas committed a serious crime as a youth. He and a friend took a boy with him in a pram, while the mother went inside the cafe to get her and her son a drink. Although the boy has never been found, Jan Thomas and his friend are convicted of murder. Eight years later, Jan Thomas is released early. Through the intermediation of the prison cleric he can apply for a job as an organist. In addition to a salary, he also gets a house. But the application jumps to the fact that he has been in prison, only when the people concerned hear him play the organ by chance, he still gets the job and the house.

Soon a great affection develops between Jan Thomas and the attractive pastor Anna and her son Jens. At first Jan Thomas doesn’t know what to do with Jens’s curiosity and affection, but as he starts to feel more for Anna, the contact with Jens also becomes easier. Life seems hesitant to take a good turn, but then one day the mother of the boy who kidnapped Jan Thomas and his friend sees him sitting behind the organ in the church. She is still consumed with uncertainty about what exactly happened to her son. And she’s determined to make sure little Jens doesn’t end up like her own son.

It takes a while before it becomes clear why this beautifully acted drama is so irritating. The structure with flashbacks is responsible and beautiful. It is also nice that you first get sympathy for Jan Thomas when you see how he tries to build a new life and how you then witness through a clever montage how terrible the grief is that he has caused Anna and her husband. Strong are also the moments of violence and confusion, which are in a good way uncomfortable, such as when prison life seems comradely and almost ideal, until his ‘friends’ Jan Thomas break his fingers and almost drown him in the overflowing sink as revenge for his premature death. release.

The irritation arises because you are led through a maze like a guinea pig with a stick, the director does not allow you to go to the left and not to the right and you are especially not allowed to think about what you see. This irritation increases as the film progresses. The feeling of embarrassment that arises in this way can be compared to meeting a random person on the street who, without asking you, tells you his or her life story with the most horrifying details. You think it’s terrible for that person, but since it is and remains a stranger, you also wonder what to do with it. The same feeling prevails here too.

‘Troubled Water’ is a beautifully acted drama, but that it is a drama is imprinted by the director in an almost suffocating way, you have to mind it all very much, he doesn’t care about nuances. It’s a bit like being held under water with your head in a flooded sink, just like Jan Thomas. And there are plenty of things in life to think of that are more pleasant than that.