AVClub: One of the four films destined to lose the foreign-language Oscar to Son Of Saul, Denmark’s A War sees writer-director Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking) once again juxtaposing a simple title with a complex situation. The war in question is the one in Afghanistan, to which Denmark sent 9,500 soldiers between 2002 and 2013. Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk, who also starred in A Hijacking) commands a unit that spends most of its time protecting innocent Afghan civilians from Taliban attacks. The film spends much of its first half-hour or so establishing Claus as a thoroughly decent guy who’s genuinely concerned about the men he sends out on sometimes lethal patrols; when one of them experiences post-traumatic stress after seeing a friend blown apart from by an IED, Claus gives him pencil-pushing duties for a while, and later even accompanies him in the field. However, that means that Claus happens to be with the company when it’s suddenly ambushed, and winds up making a decision that saves his men’s lives at the expense of 11 civilians, including six children. Was he justified? That decision is left to the viewer.
The Wrap
Writer-director Tobias Lindholm knows how to keep a human perspective in his storytelling, no matter how outsized the drama or the dilemmas facing his characters. His 2012 film “A Hijacking” hit U.S. theaters at around the same time as the similarly-themed “Captain Phillips,” and the contrast between the two was a telling one, with Lindholm’s film subtly avoiding Hollywood bombast while still capturing the tension and terror of the situation.
WOW247
Directed by Tobias Lindholm, this engaging, emotionally complex Danish drama stars Borgen’s Pilou Asbaek as Claus Pedersen, a military commander stationed in Afghanistan, who’s struggling to maintain morale among his troops following the death of a 21 year-old soldier in a landmine incident.
Variety: It’s a line often spoken in war-at-home dramas, as returning soldiers struggle to relate to unscarred civilians: “You can’t imagine what it’s like out there.” These words surface once more in “A War,” though the audience may not feel the need for them in Tobias Lindholm’s rigorous, engrossing anatomy of a suspected war crime: In its nerve-shattering first half, it conveys the on-the-ground maelstrom of combat as vividly as any film on the subject. Retaining the matter-of-fact structural simplicity and procedural meticulousness of Lindholm’s superb ship-capture thriller “A Hijacking,” “A War” doesn’t seek to break new ground in the ongoing cinematic investigation of the Afghanistan conflict; rather, it scrutinizes the ground on which it stands with consummate sensitivity and detail. Arthouse sales should be brisk, particularly with leading man Pilou Asbaek’s profile set to soar on the “Game of Thrones” battlefield.
