Two familiar premises for a personal crisis drama — the unraveling of a marriage, and recovery from a medical calamity — combine to raw and even surprising effect in Jeanette Nordahl‘s accomplished sophomore feature “Beginnings.” Arriving five years after her debut “Wildland,” a somber criminal drama quickened by an electric Sidse Babett Knudsen performance, the Danish writer-director’s follow-up once more uses confidently reserved craft and straightforward storytelling to place the spotlight on a gutsy big-name star turn, or two: this time from Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik, both without vanity and emotionally on edge as a long-married couple unsure how or when to end their relationship for good.
It’s a fraught state of limbo even before sudden disaster strikes, as Dyrholm’s high-flying working mom suffers a debilitating stroke, and an already protracted divorce process is further placed on hold. “Beginnings” observes with great care and intensity the conflicted affections and lingering obligations between a couple both impatient and unready to live apart — but extends its compassionate gaze and knotty interior understanding to other affected parties, including their increasingly fragile eldest daughter and an extra-marital lover waiting for the next chapter of her own life to begin. Nordahl and co-writer Rasmus Birch mostly keep the stakes high and the drama involving without sinking into histrionics; the resulting film, recently premiered in Berlin’s Panorama strand, is relatable and broadly distributable arthouse fare.
The opening scenes establish the bustling routine and type-A status of Ane (Dyrholm), a field-leading marine biologist and university professor with a new research project on the go, though she still makes time to play supermom to daughters Clara (impressive newcomer Björk Storm), a prodigious teen gymnast, and fanciful 10-year-old Marie (Luna Fuglsang Svelmøe). Dad Thomas (Dencik) is more laid-back in temperament, despite a high-stress job as a counselor at a delinquent boys’ home. Ane declares him “irresponsible and conflict-averse,” and it’s clear the two have been trading barbs for too long. Stray domestic tableaux perceptively capture a household high on activity and low on shared quality time: An eternally crowded kitchen worktop, used by many hands but rarely fully tidied, tells its own story.
Viewers will pick up on the bristling chill between husband and wife even before they discuss, in an early scene, when to tell the girls they’re divorcing. Though Thomas is already looking at apartments with Stine (Johanne Louise Schmidt), a colleague with whom he’s been having an affair for some time, he’s the one dragging his feet when it comes to breaking up the family unit — suggesting they withhold the truth from their kids until the sale of their house is already in motion. Ill-advised stalling turns catastrophic when medical disaster strikes: Ane survives the stroke, but is told her brain damage is too extensive to guarantee a full recovery. Constant care is required as she slowly relearns how to walk and function; Thomas dutifully steps up, but his presence brings her more aggravation than comfort.
As a recovery story, “Beginnings” is pleasingly challenging, avoiding easy breakthroughs to foreground the external and internal exhaustion of fighting a body that no longer feels entirely your own. It risks audience sympathy in the process: A standout scene sees Ane taking out a myriad frustrations on Clara during a family meal, hitting a pitch of emotional violence that is genuinely hard to watch. Dyrholm’s typically fearless performance is attentive to the character’s particular physical restrictions, but with a raging inner clarity that often erupts as a result.
Just as disconcerting is the arc traced in Clara, a happy, healthy adolescent turned brittle and sometimes startlingly spiteful by trauma, as she gradually picks up on what her parents have been hiding from her. In her screen debut, Storm limns these changes with auspicious control and maturity. Against these more volatile turns, Dencik can be a quietly grounding presence, though Thomas, too, is sometimes swollen with anger and pain, underpinned by doggedly enduring love.
Only toward the end does “Beginnings” err into obvious territory, as Ane’s premature reclamation of her independence imperils the family in ways that are all too heavily foreshadowed, and rather strain credibility. This melodramatic pivot is surplus to the requirements of a shattered family portrait already rife with conflict and complication, and most moving when centered on small, everyday gestures of tenderness and loyalty.