Aberdeen

Kaisa is a successful London lawyer who takes cocaine, spends nights with men she does not know and runs her own life from a distance. Her mother calls from Aberdeen and asks her to go to Norway and bring back the alcoholic father she has not seen in years. Kaisa goes, finds him, and then neither of them is allowed on the plane. What is left is a long return by road and sea, a journey on which the stories father and daughter tell about themselves come apart one by one. The reason for the hurry is heavier than what was said on the phone: the mother is dying, which is why she sent for her daughter. Stellan Skarsgård plays the drinking as neither tragic nor funny, just an endless job of care, and Lena Headey's hardness reads as a defence. Charlotte Rampling has few scenes but holds the film's timing. Hans Petter Moland feels no obligation to end a road movie in reconciliation.