Susanne Bier

Lisa Mullen's piece gives Susanne Bier's In a Better World a conditional criticism: if this really is a film carrying a ready-made moral lesson, then Bier has gone wrong somewhere. Mullen proposes a more interesting reading and rests it on the film's original Danish title, which means revenge; it is better, by her account, to see the film as a wrestling with the nuances of good and evil, an attempt to test the limits of virtue against raw feeling.